[B-Greek] EXESTAKENAI in Acts 8:11: transitive or intransitive?
Randy Leedy
Rleedy at bju.edu
Wed Mar 9 15:59:31 EST 2005
Thanks to Stephen Carlson and Iver Larsen for helpful input. The
quotations from the medieval sources seem particularly helpful toward
establishing the legitimacy of a transitive sense. And I appreciate
seeing the REB's rendering.
I'm not quite ready to base an understanding of the Perfect on what the
Aorist does, though, especially given the strong pattern of a transitive
first aorist and intransitive 2nd aorist. Also, I do not find any
INtransitive Present actives in the NT, so I'm not sure a claim that the
Present active can be transitive or intransitive can stand up, at least
not for the NT (I do recall that Liddell & Scott indicated that the
Present active can be transitive, so I assume the claim can be defended
across the broader literature, though I wonder what the chronological
distribution may be).
It's my understanding that, with hISTHMI, the Present active supplies
the transitive meaning for present time, while the Perfect active is the
primary form to supply intransitive meaning for present time, with the
Present passive also function this way occasionally. This pattern is
strong enough that I am certainly unwilling to throw it to the winds,
though I realize that I probably cannot maintain it as an absolute.
The conclusion I've come to for now is that the versions are indeed
defensible in their preference for the transitive, though the
intransitive can certaily be defended as well, and since the difference
matters nothing for interpretation, there's nothing to lose by viewing
the grammar as ambiguous and leaving it at that.
If anyone else wrote on the topic, I didn't get the message. So far
today my B-Greek digest hasn't appeared, which is unusual; it ordinarily
comes in at noon.
Randy Leedy
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