15.
tween those addressed and himself in thanksgiving | and prayer.—dkovoas τὴν καθ᾽ ὑμᾶς πίστιν ἐν τῷ Κυρίῳ ᾿Ιησοῦ:
having heard of your faith in the Lord Fesus. It has been wrongly inferred from the ἀκούσας that the writer had no per- sonal acquaintance with those addressed and knew of their conversion only by the report of others. Philemon was well known to Paul, who spake of him indeed as his ἀγαπητός, his συνεργός, and his son in the faith (ver. 19). Yet Paul uses with reference to him almost the same terms as those used Πετε---εὐχαριστῶ... μνείαν σου ποιούμενος. . . ἀκούων σου τὴν ἀγάπην καὶ τὴν πίστιν κ.τ.λ. (νετ. 4,5). Besides, what the writer speaks of here is not their conversion but their faith and love, and it is only in harmony with all that we know of Paul that he should have used every opportunity of keeping himself in communication with them and watching their progress. Through Ty- chicus, or some other visitor or messenger, tidings of their Christian walk may have come to him now (cf. Introduction). In any case he finds his first and foremost reason for thanksgiving in the report of the way in which the fundamental Christian requirement was made good among them —that of faith, their faith in the Lord Jesus Himself, The phrase here is not the usual Thy ὑμετέραν πίστιν, or τὴν πίστιν ὑμῶν, but τὴν καθ᾽ ὑμᾶς πίστιν. The sense, however, is substantially the same. Some good grammarians indeed seek to establish a distinction between the two phrases, and claim a special partitive or distributive sense for the one with κατά. Ellicott, ¢.g., points to the fact that the form 4 καθ᾽ ὑμᾶς πίστις is adopted only once by Paul, while πίστις ὑμῶν occurs some seventeen times in his Epistles, and concludes on the whole that the former may denote ‘the faith of the community viewed objectively,” “the faith which 15 among you,” whereas the latter expresses ‘‘ the subjective faith of individuals”. Alford, also, gives the former the sense of the “faith which prevails among you ” (on the analogy of τῷ κατ᾽ αὐτοὺς βίῳ in Thuc., vi., 16), and takes it to imply that some in the Ephesian Church may not have had the faith. So the RV gives in its text ο the faith . . . which is among you”; marg., “in you” But the analogies referred to (2.g., τῷ νόμῳ TO ὑμετέρῳ, John viii.
17, as contrasted with νόμου τοῦ καθ᾽
ὑμᾶς in Acts xviii. 15; ef. Ell.) scarcely bear this out, and there is much to show that the latter form had become, or was on the way to become, simply a peri-