[16] See the Winer-Moulton N. T. Grammar, p. 709: “It is in writers of great mental vivacity—more taken up with the thought than with the mode of its expression—that we may expect to find anacolutha most frequently. Hence they are especially numerous in the epistolary style of the apostle Paul.”
[17] Eph. iii. 1; Phil. i. 13; Philem. 9.
[18] Ch. i. 15, iv. 20, 21.
[19] Col. i. 4, ii. 1; Rom. xv. 15, 16.
[20] “My brethren” in ch. vi. 10 is an insertion of the copyists. Even the closing benediction, ch. vi. 23, 24, is in the third person—a thing unexampled in St Paul’s epistles.
[21] Ch. vi. 21, 22; Col. iv. 7–9.
[22] Compare Maclaren on Colossians and Philemon, p. 406, in this series.
[23] Τοῖς ἁγίοις τοῖς οὖσιν ... καὶ πιστοῖς ἐν Χριστῳ Ἰησοῦ. The interposition of the heterogeneous attributive between ἁγίοις and πιστοῖς is harsh and improbable—not to say, with Hofmann, “quite incredible.” The two latest German commentaries to hand, that of Beck and of von Soden (in the Hand-Commentar), interpreters of opposite schools, agree with Hofmann in rejecting the local adjunct and regarding πιστοῖς as the complement of τοῖς οὖσιν.
[24] Origen, in his fanciful way, makes of τοῖς οὖσιν a predicate by itself: “the saints who are,” who possess real being like God Himself (Exod. iii. 14)—“called from non-existence into existence.” He compares 1 Cor. i. 28.
[25] See, e.g., ver. 18, ii. 19, iii. 18, iv. 12, v. 3.