is able to lay at the Father’s feet an empire wholly subdued and everywhere accordant with the Creator’s will, Then “the Son Himseif”’ will give the crowning example of submission, ‘‘ that God may be all in all” (xv. 28). In this sublime issue the teaching of the Epistle culminates. The relation of the Church of Corinth to God, though marred upon its part yet real and sanctifying, which gave the Apostle his starting-point, has been unfolded in ever-widen- ing circles, until it is seen to embrace the universe ; there is formed within it the beginning of a Divine realm that stretches on into unknown worlds, and will bring all finite powers and beings under its sway.
Through this entire development of thought and life Christ is all things. His presence and lordship, the redeeming power of His cross, extend over every field within our view. They cover alike the relations of the individual man to God, of man to man within society, and of man, individually and collectively, to the world around him in the present and before him in the future. Christ is all in all, that through Him finally God may be all in all.
CHAPTER IV. THE LANGUAGE, TEXT, HISTORY, AND CRITICISM OF THE EPISTLE.
1. Lancuace. ‘The dialect of these Epistles (1 and 2 Cor.) is not Hebraistic, but moves upon the lines of Hellenistic Greek. It finds its analogue, in a multitude of characteristics, in the language of Polybius, the classic of Hellenism, in Epictetus, in Plutarch, in Dionysius of Halicarnassus and others, in such a way as to imply for it and them a common life-sphere”’ (Heinrici). Paul has become in this Epistle, more than elsewhere, τοῖς Ἕλλησιν ὡς Ἕλλην. Its atmosphere and colouring and movement are distinctively Greek of the pertod,—when compared, e.g., with the style of Romans or 2 Thessalonians. While Old Testament references are numerous in 1 Cor., they are employed by way of illustration rather than of proof, and in a Hellenistic not a Rabbinical manner.
The Epistle has a rich vocabulary. Out of the 5,594 Greek words of the New Testament it employs 963—103 peculiar to itself. In the hapax legomena one expects the idiosyncrasy of the Epistle to manifest itself. Sixty-eight of these—about two-thirds—are classical, occurring in Attic writers earlier than Aristotle; twenty-two belong to post-classical authors of the κοινή, or to the Greek of the contem- porary inscriptions and papyri. In the residue there is one speci- fically Septuagint term, εἰδωλεῖον (vill. 10, see note); and the Aramzan sentence, μαρὰν 404. Eleven words are left, so far unknown from other documents, or used only by Christian writers after Paul— διερµηνεία, -ευτής, εὐπάρεδρος, ὀλοθρευτής, πιθός (11. 4), περίψηµα, συνζητητής, τυπικῶς, ὑπέρακμος, χοϊκός, χρηστεύοµαι; but every one of these has close kindred or analogues in common Greek; it is likely enough that all were current in the speech of Corinth: εὐπάρεδρος however, with its transparent sense, has the look of a Pauline coinage. The forty-two additional words of 1 Corinthians (24 if the Pastorals be excluded) limited in their N.T. range to the Pauline Epistles— Pauline, but not First-Corinthian, h. lgg.—yield a similar analysis.
Out of the 150 words enumerated by Kennedy in his useful Sources of N.T. Greek (pp. 88-91) as ‘strictly peculiar to the LXX