Verse 15 has just split Paul’s fellow-preachers into two camps: some proclaim Christ διὰ φθόνον καὶ ἔριν (out of envy and rivalry), others διʼ εὐδοκίαν (out of goodwill). Verses 16–17 then take the two camps back up in reverse order — a chiasm — and give each one’s motive and mind.

Three things carry the verse:

1. The μέν … δέ pair (vv. 16–17) is structural, not decorative. Paul is sorting people, and the English must show the sorting.
2. ἐξ ἀγάπης names the source of their preaching, and stands in exact syntactic opposition to ἐξ ἐριθείας in v. 17 — a word already fixed in this project as ‘rivalry / selfish ambition.’ Love against faction: the same antithesis that will drive 2:1–4.
3. κεῖμαι is a quiet but loaded verb. It is not ‘I am here’ but ‘I have been posted’ — a divine passive in effect. Paul reads his imprisonment not as an interruption of the gospel’s defense but as his assignment to it. Combined with ἀπολογία, a courtroom word, the picture is of a man stationed at a legal post he did not choose and does not resent.

The Byzantine tradition (and hence the Textus Receptus) reverses these two verses, putting the ἐξ ἐριθείας group first so the sequence runs straight rather than chiastically. The Alexandrian witnesses — 𝔓⁴⁶, ℵ, A, B, D*, F, G, and the early versions — support the order printed in NA28, with οἱ μὲν ἐξ ἀγάπης first.

The internal argument runs the same direction as the external evidence. The chiastic order (envy/rivalry … goodwill | love … rivalry) is the harder and more rhetorically deliberate arrangement; a scribe smoothing Paul into parallel order is easy to imagine, the reverse much less so. Metzger’s committee treated the Byzantine sequence as a secondary transposition.

This is the classic case for §V of the guiding document: a real variant, with real manuscript weight behind the printed reading, and no doctrinal consequence whatever either way. Only the shape of the argument changes.

The article with μέν and δέ is standard Greek for ‘the one group … the other group,’ with no antecedent noun required (BDF §250). The construction is a divider: it takes the τινές … τινές of v. 15 and re-sorts it.

English has no particle for μέν, and dropping it is the usual solution. Under §10 that is not available here — the correlation is the verse’s skeleton. ‘These … those,’ or ‘the one group … the other,’ carries it without inventing content.

Note what Paul does not supply: there is no verb in v. 16’s main clause. The reader carries κηρύσσουσιν down from v. 15 (v. 17 will supply καταγγέλλουσιν for the second group). The literal tier leaves the gap visible; smoothed English has to fill it.

ἐκ + genitive of an abstract noun marks the wellspring of an action — what it issues from — rather than mere accompaniment. Paul uses the same construction of the opposing camp two verses on (ἐξ ἐριθείας), and the parallelism is exact and intentional.

The object of the love is unstated. Three candidates are all defensible from the context: love for Paul (nearest, given that these men know his situation and the rival group is trying to aggravate it), love for Christ, or love for the gospel. The Greek supplies no genitive, and adding one in English would resolve what Paul left open.

Both Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia read the affection as directed toward Paul personally — the men who understood his chains preached the more boldly because of him. That is the natural reading of the participial clause that follows, but it is inference from context, not from the noun.

οἶδα is a perfect in form with present meaning — settled knowledge, not a process of finding out. The participle is adverbial and unmarked as to relation; ‘knowing that…’ preserves the ambiguity, though the sense is plainly causal: their love is informed by an accurate reading of Paul’s situation.

The contrast with v. 17 is sharp and lexical. This group knows (εἰδότες); the other merely supposes (οἰόμενοι, ‘imagining, fancying’). One camp has the facts about what Paul’s imprisonment is for; the other has a theory about what their preaching will do to him. Paul is not only sorting motives but sorting perception.

ἀπολογία is a forensic term: the formal answer made by a defendant to a charge. Classical and Hellenistic usage is dominated by the courtroom (Plato’s Apology of Socrates being the type case), and the NT keeps that register — Acts 22:1; 25:16; 2 Tim 4:16, all of them literal legal proceedings.

Paul has already used the word at 1:7, paired with βεβαίωσις (confirmation), of his chains. Two questions sit inside it here, and they are not the same question:

The genitive τοῦ εὐαγγελίου is objective: the gospel is the thing defended, not the defender and not the occasion. Rendering ‘defense of the gospel’ keeps this transparent in English.

The verb’s plain sense is ‘lie, be laid down.’ Greek has no perfect passive of τίθημι in common use, and κεῖμαι fills the slot: it functions as ‘I have been placed / set / appointed’ (BDAG s.v. κεῖμαι 2). The passive force is not incidental — it means Paul is describing a placement, and the placer goes unnamed.

The NT uses it exactly this way of divinely ordained appointment: οὗτος κεῖται εἰς πτῶσιν καὶ ἀνάστασιν πολλῶν (Luke 2:34), and εἰς τοῦτο κείμεθα of the appointment to affliction (1 Thess 3:3). The construction there is identical — κεῖμαι + εἰς + accusative of the appointed end. That parallel settles the sense here.

So the rendering must not be ‘I am in prison for defending the gospel’ (which reports a circumstance) but ‘I am appointed / posted for the defense of the gospel’ (which reports an assignment). The whole force of vv. 12–18 depends on the distinction: Paul’s chains are not what happened to the gospel’s advance but the form it took.

A military flavor is often heard in ‘posted’ — a sentry set at his station. The verb itself does not carry it lexically; the sense comes from the passive-appointment idiom plus the setting. ‘Set’ or ‘appointed’ is the safe rendering; ‘posted’ is a legitimate stylistic amplification, not a lexical claim.

Chrysostom’s homily on the passage seizes on the asymmetry: the loving group preached because they knew Paul was set there for the gospel’s defense, and so wanted to see the work extended; the rival group preached to swell the accusation against him. Chrysostom’s point is that neither motive changed the content proclaimed, which is exactly Paul’s own conclusion in v. 18.

Theodoret likewise reads κεῖμαι as appointment rather than accident, glossing it in terms of Paul being entrusted with the defense. The patristic tradition, in other words, heard the divine passive without needing to argue for it.