“... ‘Jesus says, “If you do not fast (to) the world, you will not find the kingdom of God; and if you do not make the sabbath a (real) sabbath, you will not see the Father.”’ [...] ton kosmon: The accusative case here is strange, and former commentators made all sorts of suggestions regarding the interpretation of it. Comparing Clement of Alexandria’s expression, makarioi ... hoi tou kosmou nesteuontes (Stromata 3, 15, 99), some regarded it ‘as a clerical error for tou kosmou’! (e.g., C. Taylor, The Oxyrhynchus Logia and the Apocryphal Gospels [Oxford, 1899] 11-13). Others tried to make an accusative of time out of it. However, the sense of the expression is now clear to us from the Coptic, which preserves for us the two Greek words, nesteue and kosmos (possibly because the expression was strange to the Coptic translators too!), and adds the preposition e, ‘to’, before the latter word. Hence, the sense is ‘to fast to the world’. Since we have no reason to consider the Greek defective, we must regard the accusative as one of respect. ‘Fasting to the world’ must mean a withdrawal from a worldly or secular outlook; it is an abstention from the world that involves becoming a ‘solitary’ (monachos). ...”