Acts 13:1
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Thu Mar 16 15:52:13 EST 2000
At 3:09 PM -0500 3/16/00, RobRMacon at aol.com wrote:
>In Acts 13:1, EN ANTIOCEIA KATA THN OUSAN EKKLHSIAN: This seems like an odd
>way to express location of the church. I could not find any other examples
>in the New Testament of this use of KATA. Usually, KATA is used to express
>location distributively when there are several locations being considered,
>however this refers to a singular location. I did find this use of OUSA in
>Acts 11:22, with the preposition EN. Acts 13:1 uses EN, apparently to refer
>to the location of the prophets and teachers.
Actually I think KATA is used in several more ways (I started through Louw
& Nida and stopped counting them after I satisfied myself); my sense is
that in Hellenistic Greek it's rather commonly used for the classical Greek
accusative of specification without a preposition; here, where it's used in
conjunction with the locative dative with EN, I'd say it pinpoints more
precisely where the prophets and teachers were: "At Antioch, that is to say
in the congregation that was there ..." or "at Antioch, in the existing
congregation, of course ..." It strikes me as a bit idiomatic, like a
French 'c'est à dire' or a German 'zwar', an English 'i.e.' or even the
older Latinate 'scil.'
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
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