[B-Greek] Acts 8,1 with 8,3

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Tue Mar 23 22:41:14 EST 2004


> In the Bible we find several instances of an unusual(for us, of
> course) way
> of telling facts that happened.
> At first you find a summary and then some aspects of the same
> story are told
> with more details.
> So in Zach 14:
> - summary in vs. 1 - details in vs. 2
> - summary in vs. 3-4a - details in vs. 4b-7
> So in Dan 11:
> - summary in vs. 40-41
> - details in vs. 42 - 45
> If you do not see this way of telling, some aspects of the story seem to
> happen twice.
>
> In your text Acts 8: 1 can be seen as the summary and vs. 2-3 as the
> details.
> That is clear from the fact that in vs. 2-3 there are more Christians left
> in Jerusalem than the apostles alone.
>
> Arie

Although the principle of "brief summary first, details later" is very
common in Hebrew discourse and modern newspapers, it is not common in Luke's
writings or in non-Semitic Greek, so I am not sure it can be applied to
Acts.

An alternative is to understand PANTES in the less than absolute sense which
you mentioned earlier. That is, the church in Jerusalem could no longer meet
publicly and most (PANTES) of the Christians left the city. However, Paul
could still be searching for anyone house by house who might not have left.
He appears to have found a few.

My 2 cents,
Iver Larsen




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