GEbionites and feminine participle

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Wed Aug 7 19:52:48 EDT 2002


At 5:36 PM -0400 8/6/02, Eric S. Weiss wrote:
>Not quite a Biblical text, but ...
>
>... An article at the following Web page:
>
>http://www.bible.org/docs/theology/christ/thejesusgroup/jesusbaptism.htm
>
>discusses Jesus's baptism by John. Citing extracanonical witnesses to the
>Gospel accounts, the Gospel according to the Ebionites is included as
>follows (about 1/8 of the way down the page):
>
>"Another extracanonical source for Jesusí baptism is the Gospel according
>to the Ebionites, which is quoted by Epiphanius (Panarion 30.13.7ñ9). The
>section relevant to Jesusí baptism is cited as GEbion ß4:11:"
>
>What caught my attention was verse 2, which reads:
>
>"2. KAI hWS ANHLQEN APO TOU hUDATOS, HNOIGHSAN hOI OURANOI KAI EIDEN TO
>PNEUMA TO hAGION EN EIDEI PERISTERAS, KATELQOUSHS KAI EISELQOUSHS EIS
>AUTON."
>
>The English translation of this verse is given as:
>
>"2 And when he ascended from the water the heavens opened and he saw the
>Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descending and coming to him."
>
>The participles - KATELQOUSHS KAI EISELQOUSHS - are feminine, agreeing in
>gender and case with PERISTERAS. Matthew's and Mark's accounts have the
>participles agreeing with PNEUMA.
>
>I.e., "... and he saw the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, [a dove]
>descending and coming to him."
>
>1) Is this an example of (rare?) attraction (both in case and gender) of
>the participle to the case of the closest noun, or 2) did the author
>deliberately mean to write it this way to even more literally describe the
>dovelike appearance of the Holy Spirit's entering of Jesus, or 3) did the
>author make a grammatical error? What would best explain this text?

I rather doubt that GEbionites is independent of the tradition, whether
oral or written, recorded in the canonical gospels, which all have PNEUMA
hWS PERISTERAN, either as object of a verb of seeing (EIDEN, TEQEAMAI) or
as subject of an infinitive. I really don't see why there should be any
problem with the GEb text and the agreement of the participles with the
genitive PERISTERAS: the text says that what he saw really was the holy
spirit, but he saw it in the form of a dove descending and entering into
him. What was seen with the eyes was apparently a dove; we're told that
what it really was was the holy spirit.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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