[B-Greek] Mark 16:14, W

Carl W. Conrad cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Jul 10 07:25:51 EDT 2004


At 11:28 AM +0300 7/10/04, Kimmo Huovila wrote:
>Mark 16:14, Codex Washingtonianus
>
>hO MH EWN TA hUPO TWN PNEUMATWN AKAQARTA THN ALHQEIAN TOU QEOU KATALABESQAI
>DUNAMIN
>
>- In what sense do you take the hUPO+gen here? Under the power? Caused by?
>- How are ALHQEIA and DUNAMIS related? THN ALHQINHN DUNAMIN? THN ALHQEIAN KAI
>DUNAMIN? Or does the text make some sense without emendation?
>- How to take KATALABESQAI? To gain control? To comprehend?
>- Any comments on the distinction between KATALAMBANW/KATALAMBANOMAI? To what
>degree would either form favor a particular sense for the lexeme?

There are lots of questions and little to go on here; it's loaded with
problems that are sufficient, it seems to me, to raise the question whether
the intended sense is really decipherable. I don't think one can do much
with this beyond rather wild conjecture.

(a) TA hUPO TWN PNEUMATWN AKAQARTA: doesn't make a lot of sense as it
stands: "the unclean things ..." but hUPO with genitive doesn't work with
it syntactically, but suggests a passive construction to follow; on the
other hand, if AKAQARTA is emended to AKAQARTWN, then the TA becomes
problematic: we'd have a substantival phrase headed by the neuter plural
article: "the things which by the unclean spirits ... " If this phrase is
to be construed with what follows at all, it seems to me that the TA must
go and AKAQARTA must be altered to genitive, so that the phrase becomes
hUPO TWN PNEUMATWN AKAQARTWN

(b) I really think that KATALABESQAI must be seen in this fragment as an
aorist MP infinitive understood in a passive sense. That is, of course, odd
in a Koine text--a solecism?, but the hUPO + genitive construction suggests
that KATALABESQAI might be intended that way. I'd guess that "understand"
or as passive "be understood" is the sense rather than "repress" or as
passive "be repressed"--but if the antecedent of hO MH EWN is either hO
AIWN hOUTOS or (more likely) SATANAN, then "not allowing God's truth (and
power?)by unclean spirits to be understood" is conceivable.


It's an awkward construction just about any way you look at it, yet I think
that one intelligible meaning might be gotten at with the emendation of
AKAQARTA to AKAQARTWN. With that alteration I'd suggest "who does not allow
the possibility for the truth of God to be understood by the unclean
spirits" In this I'm taking DUNAMIS in an almost Aristotelian sense of
potentiality, possibility.

If DUNAMIN might be preceded by a KAI, we would have "the one who does not
let the truth and power of God to be understood by the unclean spirits"

Have you looked at Wieland Willker's textual commentary on the Greek
Gospels? There's a special section on the endings of Mark that may be found
with the other PDF files of this very helpful work:

http://www-user.uni-bremen.de/~wie/TCG/index.html

The discussion of this variant is on page 14 of that supplemental documment.
-- 

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/



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