The name of this blog site is enprotos, a reference to 1 Corinthians 15:3 where Paul calls the Gospel “of first importance.” The thing about en protos, however, is that it is bad Greek. It actually says en protois in 1 Corinthians because en is a preposition that is found with Dative case nouns and adjectives only according to Daniel Wallace. protos is in the nominative singular case. protos is an adjective.
“First” can be found in Paul’s letters in the nominative singular case here:
Romans 10:19; 1 Corinthians 14:30; 15:45; 15:47; 1 Timothy 1:15; 2:13
In all uses of “first” in the nominative case, you will not find it preceded by the preposition ev, because that is bad Greek. I actually don’t know enough Greek to say this, but it might not just be bad Greek, it might be NON-sensical Greek.
Another thing I don’t know is this: I teach U.S. History and I regularly receive papers from the students that are filled with BAD ENGLISH, verbs and the subjects don’t agree, words are misspelled, some are just flat out incoherent. The idea of inspiration of Scripture is that the original is the God-breathed text and I wonder (and again I don’t know, I’m a novice at Greek) if there is ever any bad Greek, grammatically speaking, in the New Testament or Bad Hebrew in the Old. I understand that some of the writers are more polished than others, but that doesn’t mean the less-polished write poor Grammar. It would be interesting to study.
Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar: Beyond the Basics. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996.
First and Second 