Therefore from now on know we no man after the flesh: yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet from now on know we him no more.
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Ambrosiaster
AD 400
Now that Christ has risen from the dead, birth according to the flesh loses its importance, bodily weakness ceases to count and the sufferings of death no longer matter either. Right up until the cross there was a suspicion that Christ was weak, but once he rose from the dead all that vanished and what was previously doubted came to be believed. Commentary on Paul’s Epistles.
Wherefore henceforth know we no man after the flesh. Because the love of Christ for us is so great, and constrains us, therefore we regard carnal things, that is things external and temporal, such as fame, health, friendships, kindred, of no account out of Christ. So Chrysostom takes no one to stand for "nothing," as does Vatablus; and S. Augustine (contra Faust. lib. ix. c7) takes it in the same way. But by the flesh he understands the corruption and mortality of the flesh to be meant; and the sense then would be: We no longer know this carnal and mortal life, because, filled with a sure hope, we meditate on and seek for a future life, that blissful spiritual life awaiting us after the resurrection, in which Christ is even now preparing us a place. This meaning is suitable but somewhat far-fetched, for the Apostle is here setting in opposition to the flesh, or the carnal Prayer of Manasseh , the new creature which is in this life, and which lives through faith and grace in Christ; the...
After the resurrection it was the same body which had suffered except it no longer had the human infirmities in it. For we assert that it was no longer receptive of hunger, or of weariness or of anything else of such a kind but was thereafter incorruptible, and not only this but also lifegiving. For it is the body of life, that is, the body of the Only Begotten, for it has been made resplendent with the glory most proper to his divinity and is known to be the body of God. Therefore, even if some might say that it is divine, just as, of course, it is the human body of a man, he would not err from proper reasoning. Whence I think that the very wise Paul said, “And even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” For being God’s own body, as I said, it transcends all human bodies.
Wherefore, henceforth we know no man according to the flesh; i.e. having our thoughts and hearts fixed upon Christ, as he is risen, and has prepared for us an immortal life, we know not, i.e. we do not esteem any thing in this mortal life, nor any man according to any human considerations of this life; we regard not whether they are Jews, and the sons of Abraham, or Gentiles; nay, if we have known and esteemed Christ, as descending from Abraham and David, now we know him so no longer, nor consider him as born a mortal man, but as he is risen immortal, and will bless us with an immortal and eternal glory. (Witham)
Even at this moment he is, as man, interceding for my salvation, until he makes me divine by the power of his incarnate humanity. “As man,” I say, because he still has with him the body he assumed, though he is no longer “regarded as flesh”—meaning the bodily experiences, which, sin aside, are ours and his. This is the “Advocate” we have in Jesus—not a slave who falls prostrate before the Father on our behalf. Get rid of what is really a slavish suspicion, unworthy of the Spirit. It is not in God to make that demand nor in the Son to submit to it; the thought is unjust to God. No, it is by what he suffered as man that he persuades us, as Word and Encourager, to endure. That, for me, is the beginning of his “advocacy.”
Just as before the Lord suffered his passion, when he was transformed and glorified on the mountain, he certainly had the same body that he had had down below, although of a different glory. So also after the resurrection, his body was of the same nature as it had been before the passion but of a higher state of glory and in more majestic appearance, in fulfillment of the words of Paul: “So that henceforth we know no one according to the flesh. And even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know him so no longer.” .
3. Wherefore we henceforth know no man after the flesh.
For if all died and all rose again; and in such sort died as the tyranny of sin condemned them; but rose again through the laver of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost; Titus 3:5 he says with reason, we know none of the faithful after the flesh. For what if even they be in the flesh? Yet is that fleshly life destroyed, and we are born again by the Spirit, and have learned another deportment and rule and life and condition , that, namely, in the heavens. And again of this itself he shows Christ to be the Author. Wherefore also he added,
Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now we know Him so no more.
What then? Tell me. Did He put away the flesh, and is He now not with that body? Away with the thought, for He is even now clothed in flesh; for this Jesus Who is taken up from you into Heaven shall so come. So? How? In flesh, with His body. How then does he say, Even though we have known Christ af...
Even if believers are still in their earthly bodies, we do not relate to them in that way, because the life according to the flesh has been transcended. We have been born again by the Spirit and have learned a different kind of behavior, which is that of heaven. It is Christ who has brought about this change. There was a time when we knew him in his earthly life, but now we know him in the perfection of his resurrection.
When Christ was a man, he lived in a human way, fulfilling the law. But when he died and rose again, immortal, he abolished the things of the law and took on the ways of heaven. Therefore those who have been baptized must also put the ways of the world to death and imitate the pure behavior of heaven. .
