1 Corinthians 3:7

What harvest would have sprung up from the labour of the two workers without the life which God alone could give? What then are those workers?

There is ordinarily understood as the predicate of the last proposition: is everything. But why not simply retain the preceding predicate: is anything? If in this work God alone is anything, is not this equivalent to saying that He is everything? The reading οὐδέ, nor any more, in two Alex., insists perhaps too specially on applying the idea of nothingness to Apollos.

This first development, 1 Corinthians 3:5-7, is directed against the folly of raising servants to the rank of masters. The following combats the opposition which it is sought to establish between them by comparing them with one another, and taking the liberty of rating their respective merits.