[B-Greek] Acts 2:42: Three or four concepts?
Harold Holmyard
hholmyard at ont.com
Mon Jul 10 08:45:44 EDT 2006
Dear Scott,
>The phrase "the apostle's teaching KAI the fellowship, [KAI] the breaking of
>bread KAI prayer" caught my eye this week as I was preparing a sermon. The
>KAI in brackets is a textual variant (e.g., it appears in the TR, but not in
>UBS4). I was wondering, if in fact the UBS4 is correct to omit it, are there
>four concepts divided up into two couplets separated by a comma ("the
>(1)apostle's teaching and (2)fellowship, the (3)breaking of bread and
>(4)prayer") or perhaps just three phrases ("the (1)apostle's teaching and
>the (2)fellowship in/of the breaking of bread and (3)prayer"). All phrases
>are in the dative case because all are presumably indirect objects of the
>verb (as they have traditionally been translated, anyway), but the dative
>case sometimes can function have other functions that may connect
>"fellowship" and "breaking of bread" (possessive, appositive, locative??) in
>a modifier relationship, so I wonder if that may be the reason why the KAI
>was not repeated here. Metzger's Textual Commentary says, "The Latin text of
>codex Bezae read, with vg, syr(p) cop(sa,bo), 'in the fellowship of the
>breaking of bread.'" My copy of the Vulgate doesn't have punctuation, but it
>renders the middle phrase "et communicatione fractionis panis," so that
>would seem to suggest Jerome understood a possessive relationship here. My
>Latin dictionary lists "joint partaking" as a meaning of "communicatio." Am
>I on to something here? Three concepts make more sense to me, just because
>groups of three are common in the Bible, but the historical consensus seems
>to be four concepts.
>
>
>
>
Another possibility is that there are two groupings, 1) the teaching and
2) everything else, with everything else being a series of three things
joined by "kai": "Now they were devoted to the teaching of the apostles
and to fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayers."
Yours,
Harold Holmyard
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