Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comRobertson Word Pictures - 1 Corinthians 4:6 - 4:6
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
I have in a figure transferred (meteschēmatisa). First aorist active (not perfect) indicative of metȧschēmatizō, used by Plato and Aristotle for changing the form of a thing (from meta, after, and schēma, form or habit, like Latin habitus from echō and so different from morphē as in Phi 2:7; Rom 12:2). For the idea of refashioning see Field, Notes, p. 169f. and Preisigke, Fachworter). Both Greek and Latin writers (Quintilian, Martial) used schēma for a rhetorical artifice. Paul’s use of the word (in Paul only in N.T.) appears also further in 2Co 11:13-15 where the word occurs three times, twice of the false apostles posing and passing as apostles of Christ and ministers of righteousness, and once of Satan as an angel of light, twice with eis and once with hōs. In Phi 3:21 the word is used for the change in the body of our humiliation to the body of glory. But here it is clearly the rhetorical figure for a veiled allusion to Paul and Apollos “for your sakes” (dia humas).
That in us ye may learn (hina en hēmin mathēte). Final clause with hina and the second aorist active subjunctive of manthanō, to learn. As an object lesson in our cases (en hēmin). It is no more true of Paul and Apollos than of other ministers, but the wrangles in Corinth started about them. So Paul boldly puts himself and Apollos to the fore in the discussion of the principles involved.
Not to go beyond the things which are written (to Mē huper ha gegraptai). It is difficult to reproduce the Greek idiom in English. The article to is in the accusative case as the object of the verb mathēte (learn) and points at the words “Mē huper ha gegraptai,” apparently a proverb or rule, and elliptical in form with no principal verb expressed with mē, whether “think” (Auth.) or “go” (Revised). There was a constant tendency to smooth out Paul’s ellipses as in 2Th 2:3; 1Co 1:26, 1Co 1:31. Lightfoot thinks that Paul may have in mind O.T. passages quoted in 1Co 1:19, 1Co 1:31; 1Co 3:19, 1Co 3:20.
That ye be not puffed up (hina mē phusiousthe). Sub-final use of hina (second use in this sentence) with notion of result. It is not certain whether phusiousthe (late verb form like phusiaō, phusaō, to blow up, to inflate, to puff up), used only by Paul in the N.T., is present indicative with hina like zēloute in Gal 4:17 (cf. hina ginōskomen in 1Jo 5:20) or the present subjunctive by irregular contraction (Robertson, Grammar, pp. 203, 342f.), probably the present indicative. Phusioō is from phusis (nature) and so meant to make natural, but it is used by Paul just like phusaō or phusiaō (from phusa, a pair of bellows), a vivid picture of self-conceit.
One for the one against the other (heis huper tou henos kata tou heterou). This is the precise idea of this idiom of partitive apposition. This is the rule with partisans. They are “for” (huper) the one and “against” (kata, down on, the genitive case) the other (tou heterou, not merely another or a second, but the different sort, heterodox).