1 John 1:2 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

He interrupts the stream of his discourse by this seasonable parenthesis, while he therein gives an account how the Word of life, the life, that eternal life, (already noted to be here all one, and chiefly to mean the Son of God), which being with the Father must be to us invisible, came to be so sensibly known to mortal men on earth; which he doth by telling us he was manifested; and that was sufficiently done, both who he was, and what he designed, in his partaking with us of flesh and blood, and being found in fashion as a man, whereby he subjected himself to the notice of our senses; and was hereupon said to have been manifested in the flesh, 1 John 3:5 1 Timothy 3:16; the glory of his Divinity also shining forth most conspicuously in his God-like conversation, and wonderful works, through this veil, and confirming the truth of his heavenly doctrine, which more distinctly declared both that it was the Son of God who was come down into this wretched world of ours, and what the kind design was of his descent hither. So that what here the apostle says more briefly, that he was manifested, well admits the larger account which he gives of it in his Gospel, 1 Thessalonians 1:14: And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father), full of grace and truth. Whereupon (as he adds) he bears witness, and shows forth what he had seen so manifested, as it belonged to his apostolical office to do.