Iv,

sions show how difficult it is to do justice to this sentence in English, The AV takes refuge in a paraphrase, ‘‘and cun- ning craftiness whereby they lie in wait to deceive’’. Wicl. gives “το the deceiv- ing of error "’; Cov., “το the deceitfulness of error’’; Bish., ‘‘in craftiness to the laying in wait of error”; Rhem., “to the circumvention of error”; RV, ‘in craftiness, after the wiles oferror”. The Vulg. has in astutia ad circumventionem erroris. πανουργία, used in 1 Cor. iii, 19, of a false wisdom, means here, as in classical and also in later Greek, cunning, knavishness, treacherous deceitfulness. The ἐν πανουργίᾳ is taken by some as a definition of the ἐν κυβείᾳ, adding to the idea of hazard and destruction con- tained in the latter, the idea of fraud, But it is rather a distinct clause, em- phasising the dishonesty and trickery of the false teaching. Its authors u all the arts of deception to persuade the γήπιοι that their self-made doctrine was the Divine truth. The prep. πρός is not to be identified with ral (=after, accord- ing to), but has its sense of with a view to, furthering, tending to. The noun οδεία (or μεθοδία according to TWH) is nowhere found in the NT except here and once again in this same Epistle (vi. 11), and seems not to occur in non-Bib- lical Greek, whether that of the LXX or that of the Classics. Its meaning here, however, may be safely taken to be trick- ery, cunning arts, treacherous wiles; as its verb μεθοδεύω, which means primaril to pursue a plan, whether honest (Dio Sic., i., 81), or dishonest (Polyb., xxxiv., 4, 10), came to have the sense of follow- ing craftily, practising deceitful devices (Diod., vii., 16; 2 Sam. xix. 27). The gen. πλάνης is usually taken as the gen. subj., = the πλάνη which practises craft. But it may rather be the gen. obj., expressing the object or result of the μεθοδεία, = “the cunning art that works to error”, The article gives the noun the abstract sense or the force of a personification, = Error. Here, as elsewhere, πλάνη has the passive sense of error, not the active sense of seduction, or misleading (Luth., de Wette, etc.). But the question re- mains as to the precise idea here. The term means properly speaking error in the sense of straying from the way, wandering hither and thither. That sense is frequent in classical Greek— Aeschyl., Eurip., Plato, etc. Inthe NT the word is usually said to be used of mental error, wrong opinion, as ¢.g., in 1 Thess. ii. 3; 2 Thess. ii. 11; 2 Pet ii, 18, iti. 17; Jude τα; 1 John iv. 6