participle is temporal or instrumental. Did the readers become imitators of the missionaries “when they received the gospel in great distress” or “by receiving the gospel in great distress”? Put another way, was their imitation achieved by the way in which they received the gospel (instrumental) or did their imitation consist in their experience of considerable opposition at the time that they became converts (temporal)? The problem with the instrumental understanding is that it makes the imitation
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