Minded for disposed, A.V.; pass over for pass, A.V.; encouraged him, and wrote to for wrote exhorting, A.V.; and … he helped for who … helped, A.V. To pass over into Achaia. Nothing can be more natural than the course of events here described.
In his intimate intercourse with Priscilla and Aquila, Apollos had necessarily heard much of the great work at Corinth, and the flourishing Church there; and so he longed to see for himself and to exercise his powers in watering what St.
Paul had so well planted (1 Corinthians 3:6). Priscilla and Aquila having heard his eloquent sermons at Ephesus, and being interested in the Corinthian Church, seem to have encouraged him, and to have joined with the other disciples at Ephesus in giving him commendatory letters to the Church of Corinth.
Encouraged him; προτρεψάμενοι, a word found nowhere else in the New Testament, but used in classical Greek and in the Apocrypha, in the sense of "exhorting," "urging." προτρεπτικοὶ λόγοι are hortatory words.
In medical writers a "stimulant" is προτρεπτικόν. There is a difference of opinion among commentators whether the exhortation was addressed to Apollos, as the R.V. takes it, or to the brethren at Corinth, as the A.
V. understands it. It seems rather more consonant to the structure of the sentence and to the probability of the case that the exhortation was addressed to the Corinthian Church, and not to Apollos, who needed no such encouragement, προτρεψάμενοι ἔγραψαν is equivalent to "wrote and exhorted."