![]() Grace, as Paul stated, came from God the Father and Jesus Christ. This transcended the common greeting and was exclusively Christian. He greeted his fellow believers with grace and peace from God the Father and Jesus Christ. These were not unusual words, but Paul filled them with a new and deeper significance. Thus instead of the familiar ‘greetings,’ Paul salutes his brothers and sisters in Christ with ‘grace to you-and peace.’” In Paul’s hands this now becomes charis (‘grace’), to which he adds the traditional Jewish greeting shalom (‘peace,’ in the sense of ‘wholeness’ or ‘well-being’). Gordon Fee, professor of New Testament studies and author of many scholarly volumes on the Bible, writes regarding Philippians 1:2 in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: The New International Commentary on the New Testament: “The traditional greeting in the Hellenistic world was chairein. With a minor tweak to common wording, and some key expansions, he conveyed some great spiritual truths that hold profound significance for Christians 2,000 years ago as well as today. While Paul’s words are similar to the common greeting used in letters among Greek speakers and writers of his day, he had actually coined a new phrase that was infused with deep meaning. What did Paul mean by this greeting? Since he uses these same words in each of the letters that bears his name, we should pay close attention to them-and what they meant to Paul as well as to his immediate audience. A particularly notable one is the greeting the apostle Paul uses in each of his letters to church congregations preserved for us in the Bible: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Paul uses this same greeting in the first few verses of each of his letters to the churches, and he uses the same or a very similar greeting when writing to individuals such as Timothy and Titus. The Bible is filled with many such examples.
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