about property by arbitration among themselves. And the early Christians, who were not distinguished as a distinct class from the Jews, had no doubt the same privilege. It is not necessary, however, to assume that the apostle has reference here to that privilege. It was enough that these civil suits might be arranged without the disgraceful spectacle of Chris- tian suing Christian before heathen magistrates. The Rab- bins say, " It is a statute which binds all Israelites, that if one Israelite has a cause against another, it must not be prosecuted before the Gentiles." Eiseyimengefs Entdeckt. Judenth. ii. p. 427.
Dare any of you f Is any one so bold as thus to shock the Christian sense of propriety ? Having a matter. The Greek phrase {Trpayfxa Ixetv) means to have a suit, which is obviously the sense here intended. To go to law before the U7ijust. It is plain that by the unjust are meant the heathen. But why are they so called ? As the terms holy and righteous are often used in a technical sense to designate the professed people of God without reference to personal character ; so the terms sinners and unjust are used to designate the heathen as distinguished from the people of God. The Jews as a class were holy, and the Gentiles were unholy ; though many of the latter were morally much better than many of the former. In Gal. 2, 15, Paul says to Peter, "We are by nature Jews, and not sinners of the Gentiles ; " meaning thereby simply that they were not Gentiles. The reason why the heathen as such are called the unjust, or sinners, is that according to the Scriptures the denial of the true God, and the worship of idols, is the greatest unrighteousness ; and therefore the heathen, because heathen, are called the unrighteous. The word un- just is too limited a word to answer fully to the Greek term (aSiKo?), which in its scriptural sense means wicked, not con- formed to the law of God. In this verse the opposite term, saints, or the holy, designates Christians as a class; and, therefore, the unjust must mean the heathen as a class. The complaint against the Corinthians was not that they went to law before unjust judges, but that they ajDpealed to heathen judges. It is true their being heathen proved them to be un- righteous in the scriptural sense of the term ; but it was not their moral character, so much as their religious status, that w^as the ground of the complaint. It was indeed not to be expected that men governed by heathen laws and principles of morals, would be as fair and just as those governed by