Grace be to you and peace ( χάρις ὑμῖν καὶ εἰρήνη); grace to you and peace. Here, as often, we have combined the form of salutation prevalent among Greeks, χαίρειν (found in its unaltered form in James 1:1, "wishing joy"), Christianized into χάρις, grace, which denotes the outpouring of Divine benignity in all such spiritual blessings as sinful creatures need; and the Hebrew greeting, shalom, which in its transformation into εἰρήνη may be supposed to have dropped in its Christianized signification some of its originally comprehensive meaning, which comprised all "health and wealth" as well as "peace," and to have generally expressed the more limited idea of that calm sense of reconciliation and that perfect security against evil which constitute the peculiar happiness of a soul which believes in Christ.
It is nevertheless conceivable that εἰρήνη, as used in Hellenistic Greek, may at times have widened the sense proper to it in ordinary Greek into the more comprehensive import of the shalom, which it was regularly employed to represent.
From God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ ( ἀπὸ θεοῦ πατρός καὶ κυρίου ἡμῶν ἰησοῦ χριστοῦ). These words regularly form a part in the apostle's formula of greeting. With slight variations they are found in all his Epistles, except, perhaps, the First to the Thessalonians, where, though read in the Textus Receptus, they are omitted by recent editors.
"Our" is added to "Father" in at least seven of St. Paul's Epistles (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon). This warrants the belief that, when as in 1 Timothy, Titus, and here, he wrote "God the Father," he most probably did so with reference to God's fatherly relation to the members of Christ's Church.
Tregelles and the margin of the revised Greek text, in fact, read ἡμῶν after πατρὸς here, omitting it after κυρίου. Uniformly in this formula of greeting we find only one preposition, "from" ( ἀπό), before the two names, "God" and "Jesus Christ;" as in the first verse in this Epistle there is only one preposition, "through," before "Jesus Christ" and "God."
The apostle, looking upwards, discerns, as St. Stephen did, in the ineffable glory, the supreme God in whom he recognizes "our Father," and with him Jesus Christ, "our Lord;" that is, our Master, Head, Mediator, "through whom are all things, and we through him."
Grace and peace coming down from heaven, must come from God our Father and Jesus Christ our Lord. From the very nature of the case it is obvious that the blessings referred to come to us through Christ, though also "from" him; as also that St.
Paul's delegation as apostle, spoken of in the first verse, originated from a volition and appointment of God the Father, as well as was brought about "through" the ordering of his providence. But in each case the preposition used by the apostle preserves its proper force, not to be confused by our thrusting into it another notion not just then in the writer's view.