Russ, I'm very sorry that my message came out that way, honestly. I got that impression from the tenor of your two messages, the first of which seemed to me to look for the TOUTO to refer back to one of the feminine nouns in the preceding clause, while the second asked if "this could be the solution" by pointing to instances in classical Attic texts where an antecedent of a different gender was picked up subsequently by a neuter pronoun. I guess you were actually still exploring an alternative to understanding the whole preceding clause as the antecedent of the TOUTO. In fact, the reason that I went back and carefully read through the LSJ article on hOUTOS was because those citations DID indicate possible reference of TOUTO to a masculine or feminine antecedent and I wanted to be sure that the idiomatic backwards-referring TOUTO wasn't also adequately attested in LSJ. The rather lengthy discussion of this passage in Wallace indicated that there had been a history of attempts to refer
the TOUTO back to PISTIS, and I thought that you were aligning yourself with that reasoning. I expressed myself very poorly, and I very much regret any insulting tone.
Regards, cwc