What he has said and done was buttressed by the signs and wonders he did through the power of the Spirit. The dative phrase is how Christ has reached the Gentiles through Paul. The other way to understand the shift from the dative to the prepositions is to follow the NIV (see second phrasing above). The ESV sets the three points off with dashes: “For I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me to bring the Gentiles to obedience-by word and deed, by the power of signs and wonders, by the power of the Spirit of God-so that from Jerusalem.”
The final “by the power of the Spirit of God” is how all his words and works, all his signs and wonders, were accomplished solely by the power of God’s Spirit. Even though the three-fold structure is obvious, it doesn’t mean that every line is making the same point.
It is unfortunate that some translations don’t make the three-points obvious both the simple dative and the preposition ἐν can express the idea of “by.”Ībsolutely everything Paul has accomplished, whether his preaching or actions, or the powerful signs and wonders he was enabled to do, all of this is to be attributed to the power of the Spirit. Paul then sets up a three ways in which God accomplished this work. Moo translates, "anything other than what Christ accomplished” (892n47). Paul’s intention, apparently, was to give “greater emphasis to his rejection of the possibility of referring to something other than what Christ has wrought through him, but, by so doing, has succeeded in making the rest of the sentence follow extremely awkwardly” (Cranfield, 2:758). Paul is attributing every last bit of all of his “successes” to Christ, absolutely everything.īut why then the negation οὐ? He could have used the normal (positive) πλήν or ἐκτός (Cranfield) for “except,” but Paul is wanting to be emphatic, and the use of a double negation stresses this point.
Although it breaks the strict rules of grammar, its meaning is clear. What’s awkward is that ὧν is plural even though its antecedent τι is singular.
He could have stated it in the positive - “I dare to speak only about” - but he is going out of his way to emphatically attribute all of his “success” to God. Paul starts by asserting that οὐ γὰρ τολμήσω τι λαλεῖν, he would not dare to speak about anything.
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