THi ELEUQERIAi in Gal 5:1 (Doch Nochmals)
Jonathan Ryder
jpr1001 at cam.ac.uk
Tue Jun 8 13:02:50 EDT 1999
"Carl W. Conrad" wrote:
> There still remains to me one hope of making sense of the text as the
> UBS4/NA27 editors have constituted it; Brian Tucker himself raised it in
> his most recent (but now somewhat dated) message on this thread:
>
> At 3:52 PM -0400 6/3/99, Joseph Brian Tucker wrote:
> >. . . The possibility of the purpose use might relate to Deissmann's
> >discovery that THi ELEUQERIAi was used in the sacral manumission procedures
> >of the day to emphasize purpose Light from the Ancient East, 326.
>
> I AM intrigued by this and I'd like to know more. I am not close enough to
> a decent library where I could check Deissmann's celebrated book. Could
> anyone who has it in a personal library tell us a little more about this,
> please? I ask this because it seems quite plausible that a dative of
> purpose might be used with ELEUQEROW in a formula of manumission, and it
> strikes me as a (rather!) thrilling notion that Paul could be quite
> deliberately emulating a formula of manumission, in which case we might
> translate Gal 5:1: "Christ has set us free to be free persons ...", i.e.
> THi ELEUQERIAi = hOPWS ELEUQEROI WMEN. IF ELEUQERIAi ELEUQEROUN is a
> formula of manumission, then we would not need to fancy abstractions of
> Hegelian metaphysics.
>
> Carl W. Conrad
>
OK here goes - some stuff from Deissmann:
p322 'The usual form of these documents must have been extremely well known, because
they are so numerous. It is like this[5]:-
Date " NN sold to the Pythian Apollo a male slave named XY at a price of -
minae, for freedom (or on condition that he shall be free, etc)." ...
footnote [5] reads:
The texts are so numerous that individual quotation is unnecessary
However, all is not lost, as Deissmann does quote an example, less frequent, of 'sale
to the god as trustee' (p323)
The relevant Greek:
EPRIATO hO APOLLWN ... PARA SWSIBIOU ... EP' ELEUQERIAI ...
which Deissmann translates as:
Apollo ... bought from Sosibius ..., for freedom, ...
on p324 he quotes Gal 5:1 and 13:
'For freedom did Christ set us free ... ye were called for freedom (EP'
ELEUQERIAi)'
noting that the latter is 'literally the other formula of the records'
It seems then that Paul's use in 5:13 reflects the manumission formula more closely
than 5:1, if 5:1 does at all.
that's all I've got time for, others may want to expand ...
Jonathan Ryder
Cambridge
UK
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