Romans 16:7

Larry Swain swainl at calcite.rocky.edu
Sun Aug 9 23:43:58 EDT 1998


On Sun, 9 Aug 1998, Jonathan Robie wrote:

> Here's Robertson's comments from Word Pictures:
> 
> "Among the apostles (en tois apostolois). Naturally this means that they are
> counted among the apostles in the general sense true of Barnabas, James,
> the brother of Christ, Silas, and others. But it can mean simply that they
> were famous in the circle of the apostles in the technical sense."
> 
> I agree with both the substance and the tone of this - to me, the most
> natural reading is that they were among the apostles in the same way that
> these others were. You have to stretch it a little to read it the second
> way.

I'm curious Jonathan, why you would make such a remark?  Is there
something grammatically that leads you to say this that I've missed?  It
seems to me that the two constructions one would expect would be this one
or a partitive genitive, but my impression (which I do reserve the right
to be wrong-Carl?  Edward?  Mary?) is that in Koine EN + Dative is as
common.  So I'm curious.

Larry Swain




More information about the B-Greek mailing list