[Steven Avery]

Hi Folks,

Now .. perhaps the most interesting early church writer usage.

Gregory of Nyssa, writing in Greek, reading the Greek, uses the phrase in our expansive sense, where there is a special effort, the careful exertion, geared towards finding our proverbial gnat, while the camel now has extra 'weights of wickedness'.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Nicene...k_I/Chapter_10
Treatises Against Eunomius Book I-Chapter 10

On these last he is certainly great, heightening the enormity of the offence, and making solemn reflections on falsehood, and seeing equal heinousness in it whether in great or very trivial matters. Like the fathers of his heresy, the scribes and Pharisees, he knows how to strain a gnat carefully and to swallow at one gulp the hump-backed camel laden with a weight of wickedness.

Shalom,
Steven