Note 49 — Chapter XI
Reading edition
As the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (vol. i. p. 324) has given its sanction to the view that “St. Paul required the presbyter-bishop to have had the experience of marriage and with at least a preference for those who had brought up children (1 Tim. iii. 2, 4), and extended the requirement even to the deacons of the Church (1 Tim. iii. 11, 12),” it seems to be worth while to repeat the declaration of Ellicott and Huther, that “the strange opinion of Bretschneider, that μιᾶς is here the indefinite article, and that Paul meant that a bishop should be married, hardly needed the elaborate refutation which is accorded to it by Winer, Grammar of New Testament, III. 18 (Eng. Tr., p. 146).” Would any Englishman ever say “a bishop must have one wife,” when his meaning was “a bishop must have a wife”?