In his important work, On the Unity of Christ, Cyril of Alexandria writes, “For there is only one Son, the Word who was made man for our sake. I would say that everything refers to him, words and deeds, both those that befit the deity, as well as those which are human.” While affirming Christ’s two natures, Cyril teaches us that when considering the one person of Christ we do not consider his divine nature “nakedly”, i.e., in abstraction from the hypostatic union. Yet, Cyril’s comment raises the question of how we read Scripture when some things Jesus does are divine and other things are human. If Christ is one person, does a two nature Christology have anything to say about how we should read Holy Scripture? One text that illustrates this is John 11 where Jesus weeps and raises his friend Lazarus from the dead.
Thus, in this essay, I seek to retrieve the insights of Cyril to consider how a robust two nature Christology informs how we are to read Holy Scripture considering the reality of Christ’s unified person. To this end, I will first investigate Cyril’s approach in On the Unity of Christ as well as his commentary on the Gospel of John, especially John 11. I will then put Cyril in dialogue with modern commentaries on the gospel of John, in particular, the works of D.A. Carons and David Ford. My conclusion is that retrieving Cyril’s method provides an interpretive strategy that allows us to read such texts theologically in a way that more robustly honors the concerns of Chalcedon than most modern commentaries allow.