Jack Finegan, Light from the Ancient Past (Princeton, 1946), p. 292, and fig. 124.
E. Best, One Body in Christ (SPCK, 1955), ch. 1. This chapter gives an excellent summary of several views of the meaning of the phrase.
Cited from E. Hennecke, New Testament Apocrypha, ed. W. Schneemelcher, vol. 2 (Lutterworth, 1965), p. 354.
Orr and Walther illustrate the point from Edward Hall’s Chronicle, which tells of Bishop Tonstall’s purchase of Tyndale’s translation of the Bible in order to burn the books. But Tyndale used the money to print an increased number of Bibles so that in the end the bishop aided the cause he sought to destroy. Hall comments that Tonstall thought ‘that he had God by the toe, when indeed he had … the devil by the fist’. Orr and Walther go on, ‘Paul’s quotation from a Psalm is to the same intent: human reasoning in no way outwits God.’
