Verse 6
6. Come unto you Literally, is present with you. The gospel in its onward course had reached them, and was then abiding with them, even as it was also in all the world. We must not misconstrue this hyperbolical expression into a literal assertion of the universal diffusion of Christianity at that period, or even of its spread throughout the Roman empire. The missionary labours, so prominent in the history of later years, forbid such an interpretation, while the establishment of the gospel in many of the chief centres in so brief a time, justifies the readily intelligible language without our forcing upon it a meaning which cannot be confirmed by the facts. If, however, with recent editors, we omit the word and, this clause connects with what follows rather than with what precedes, and the statement becomes one of fruit-bearing in all the world.
Fruit The best MSS.
read, and is bringing forth fruit and increasing: the former referring to its work in themselves individually, in their growing holiness of character and life, and the latter to its extension to other people around them. The personal spiritual growth of converts, and additions to their numbers, marked its career everywhere. It had been conspicuously so at Colosse from the very first.
In truth In its true form, unmixed with Jewish or Gnostic perversions.
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