[B-Greek] historical present in LUKE
bitan buth
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
Sun Oct 9 06:58:45 EDT 2005
Carlton EGRAPSEN
>I do not want to raise the discussion of gospel sources, but
for those who accept use of Mark as a source for Matthew and Luke, it
is interesting that there are over 140 such uses in Mark, 71 or 72 in
Matthew and one in a quote in Luke. Did Luke feel that this was
improper use of the language? Yes, I am aware that some of these
instances are in places where there are no parallels but many are and
appear to be deliberately "corrected" by Matthew and especially by
Luke.>
Luke actually has a few more historical presents:
Luke 7:40, 8:49, 11:37, 11:45.
Only one, 8:49, is parallel to Mark (close but not an exact quote)
and there are another 13 in Acts,
Acts 8:36, 10:11, 27, 31, 12:8 and especially
second Acts 19:35, 21:37, 22:2, 23:18, 25:5, 22, 24, 26:24
(curiously all verbs of speaking in second Acts: LEGEI, FHSIN).
It would appear that Luke himself has no objections to the
historical present, in fact, he uses the historic present himself.
So why are only one of the 140 Marcan examples paralleled in Luke?
(Especially considering that close to half of Mark's examples are
verbs of speaking like Luke's preference.)
The above stylistic evidence is another thread that points to
Luke using a source that was not Mark, a shared source with our Mark.
Mark would have added his own layer of historic presents to this shared
source.
See Buth-Kvasnica, on parable of vineyard, in Notley, ed.,
forthcoming Brill, 2005, supposedly in time for SBL.
ERRWSQE,
Randall Buth
Randall Buth, PhD
Biblical Language Center
www.biblicalulpan.org
c/o margbuth at gmail.com
also, Director, Biblical Studies in Israel
under Rothberg International School,
Hebrew University
ybitan at mscc.huji.ac.il
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