First Epistle of Peter. 477 



" That av is not to be found in the Epistle " he says " is alone 

 sufficient to show that the writer was not a Greek." (Com. p. 5.) 

 The weakness of this argument is made obvious by the above ar- 

 rangement of the words which he cites. It is seen that this par- 

 ticle does not appear in a number of Paul's Epistles. True, Paul 

 was not a Greek by birth, yet his native city was a center of Greek 

 culture of no little consequence. He had abundant opportunity 

 in Tarsus to learn the Greek language thoroughly. At any rate 

 we are assured by his writings that he was a master of the Greek 

 language. It is to be noted that in all his Epistles, which compose 

 cir. 25 % of the N. T., av appears but thirty times, whereas in Matthew, 

 which certainly goes back to a Semitic original, the word occurs 

 forty-one times. The above table shows that Paul, or his amanu- 

 ensis, employed the particle very freely at times and at other times 

 not at all. That the word appears in Matthew about as often as 

 in Luke and Acts combined, which, on the whole, are written in 

 as good Greek as is to be found in the N. T., shows that Bigg's 

 argument has practically nothing to support it. Furthermore it 

 involves an inconsistency, in that, he admits that our author pos- 

 sessed " a remarkable correctness of usage." He also states that 

 " the article is employed in more classical style than by any other 

 writer in the N. T., and still more striking is the refined accuracy 

 of his use of w?." (Cf. Com. p. 4.) These concessions certainly do 

 not support his claim that our author " could not have been a Greek." 



