The Lamb

It has been asked since the second century, and the Baptist did not say. The Passover lamb of Exodus 12 is the commonest answer, and 1 Corinthians 5:7 and John 19:36 stand behind it. Origen, in his Commentary on the Gospel of John book 6, argued for the daily burnt-offering instead: of all the animals on the altar, the lamb is the one offered perpetually. Cyril of Alexandria (Commentary on John 2) and Eusebius (Proof of the Gospel 1.10) heard Isaiah’s sheep, whose subject Scripture itself identifies at Acts 8:35, though what the Baptist meant is not recorded. Augustine (Sermon 19.3) heard the lamb of Moriah.

John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755), keeps several of them at once on John 1:29.

The New Testament afterwards uses all of these. This page names the four readings and the men who held them, and leaves the choice to the reader.

Wesleyreads it at full extent: “all the sins: of the world - Of all mankind. Sin and the world are of equal extent.” The Glossa Ordinaria, the standard medieval gloss on the verse, narrowed it to original sin. Theophylact, in his Commentary on John, pressed the tense: he says not who will take, but who taketh away, as if He were always doing it. And Gregory the Dialogist pressed the other end: But then only will sin be entirely taken away from the human race, when our corruption has been turned to a glorious incorruption. We cannot be free from sin, so long as we are held in the death of the body. All three stand together in the Catena Aurea on this verse, which is where this page reads them.

Four ancient readings of one clause, none of them disparaged. How far the atonement reaches is argued properly on Justification by Faith, not here.

• The Lamb. Conquers by being slain. Worthiness in this book is never raw force; the scroll opens because blood was spent, not because power was applied. Revelation 5:5–9
• The saints. Conquer by the same instrument: “because of the blood of the Lamb, and because of the word of their testimony; and they loved not their life even unto death.” Revelation 12:11
• The seven churches. Each letter ends with a promise “to him that overcometh”, the tree of life, the crown, the hidden manna, the morning star, a place on the throne. The verb is the same one used of the Lamb. Revelation 2:7 – 3:21

The verb is nikao(G3528) in all three places: Revelation 5:5 of the Lamb, 12:11 of the saints, and 2:7 of the churches. This is why Revelation can be given to a church about to lose. The word it uses of Antipas at 2:13 is the ordinary word for a witness; the sense in which English says martyr is later than the book, and the church took it from passages like this one. Antipas is dead and named faithful, the souls under the altar are told to rest a little longer, and the ethic of the whole book is the Lamb’s own method, handed to His people.

• 5:12 “Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain”, heaven's sevenfold doxology
• 7:14 Robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb
• 12:11 They overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb
• 14:1 The Lamb on Mount Zion with the hundred and forty and four thousand
• 21:9 “Come hither, I will show thee the bride, the wife of the Lamb”
• 21:14 Twelve foundations, the twelve apostles of the Lamb
• 21:27 Only they that are written in the Lamb's book of life
• 22:1, 3 The river of life, out of the throne of God and of the Lamb

The colour of this ledger climbs deliberately, blood-crimson to lamp-gold: the book does not move away from the sacrifice as it goes on, it moves further into it. The last thing the Lamb does in Scripture is give light.

Revelation carries one more lamb, and it is the beast. Conquest, throne and judgment all run through a sacrifice, so a counterfeit authority has to look like that too, and the book says it will, right down to borrowing the name.

For the deceiver seeks to liken himself in all things to the Son of God. Christ is a lion, so Antichrist is also a lion; Christ is a king, so Antichrist is also a king. The Saviour was manifested as a lamb; so he too, in like manner, will appear as a lamb, though within he is a wolf.

The Gospels and the epistles call Jesus amnos(the ordinary word for a sacrificial lamb) at John 1:29. Revelation almost never uses it. John’s word here is arnion, a diminutive in form, which is a form that names a small one of a kind. Strong’s own key of 1890 files it as “a lambkin”, and H. B. Swete, in The Apocalypse of St John (1906), reads the little lamb of the throne room as the point of the word. Scholars dispute whether that diminutive force was still live in first-century Greek, and Revelation uses the same word once of the beast (13:11).

That reading is old, and the reversal it describes in Revelation 5:6 is genuinely there. Two things are honestly said against it. First, a great many Koine nouns ending in -ιον had lost their diminutive force by the first century: Revelation itself calls the beast therion, formally a diminutive, and means a wild beast by it rather than a small one. Second, this verse: the two horns of a beast are called arnion, and “lambkin” is plainly not the point there.

Both are worth the reader’s knowing. The reversal at the throne does not depend on the diminutive: a slain animal standing in the middle of the throne is the reversal, whatever the ending of the noun is doing.

The KJV and the ASV attach the phrase to the slaying: the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Most modern versions attach it to the writing of the names, on the strength of the parallel at Revelation 17:8, where the same construction describes names not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world; Swete reads it that way in The Apocalypse of St John(1906). The word order sits closer to the slaying and the parallel at 17:8 pulls the other way, and the difference is real: one sentence says when the Lamb was slain in God’s purpose, the other says when the names were written. Scripture does not settle it here.

And all who dwell on the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written from the foundation of the world in the Book of Life belonging to the Lamb who was slain.

Revelation 13:8 (BSB)

• God did not provide a lamb on Moriah. He provided a ram. The promise stands unpaid at the end of Genesis 22.
• The Passover victim did not have to be a lamb. Exodus 12:5 allows a goat, and says so plainly.
• Isaiah 53 never uses the word Messiah and never names its subject. Acts 8:34 records a reader asking for exactly that reason, and Acts 8:35 is where the name is supplied.
• Revelation never explains why the word changed from the Gospels’ amnos to its own arnion. The change is real; every account of why is inference.
• The Lamb is seen “as though slain,” and no more is said. Revelation 5:6 does not describe the wounds.

And the Jews even now exhibit a figure of this transaction when they mark their thresholds with the blood of a lamb. … not that the blood of a sheep had such efficacy in itself as to be the safety of men, but it was an image of things to come.

Arnion stands thirty times in the Greek New Testament, twenty-nine of them in Revelation, and those twenty-nine fall in twenty-seven verses because two verses use the word twice. The thirtieth stands outside Revelation, and it is what Jesus calls the people He hands to Peter on a beach.

When they had finished eating, Jesus asked Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love Me more than these?” “Yes, Lord,” he answered, “You know I love You.” Jesus replied, “Feed My lambs.”

John 21:15 (BSB)

The Good Shepherd carries the other half of the flock image.

The counts come from a Hebrew and Greek text of the whole Bible with every word marked, so each figure can be checked verse by verse. Seh stands forty-seven times, thirteen of them in Exodus, more than in any other book. Kevesstands a hundred and seven times under its own Strong’s number, more than twice as often, and none of them is in Isaiah 53; the same word spelled kesevis filed under a second number besides. Every card links to the word’s own page, where the verses are listed.