[B-Greek] Acts 8:7 grammatically disjointed?

Webb webb at selftest.net
Fri Aug 10 17:30:57 EDT 2007


POLLOI GAR TWN ECONTWN PNEUMATA AKAQARTA BOWNTA FWNHi MEGALHi EXHRCONTO
(Acts 8:7a)

NRSV renders this statement, "For unclean spirits, crying with loud shrieks,
came out of many who were possessed".

You can see that POLLOI is the wrong case for this to be a straightforward
translation solution. It seems to me that the sentence starts one way and
finishes another. It starts off

POLLOI GAR TWN ECONTWN PNEUMATA AKAQARTA, "Because many of those who had
unclean spirits.".

Then the author wants to say that these many folks had their unclean spirits
expelled. The grammatical subject is POLLOI, but it's really not the people
with the unclean spirits who are going to do something in the expulsion-it's
the spirits. So the gears are shifted, and the back half assumes that it is
the spirits that are the subject of the verb:

BOWNTA FWNHi MEGALHi EXHRCONTO, "they were coming out crying with a loud
voice".

The apparent result is that the front half and the back half of the sentence
don't link up right. I'm guessing that that's just how things go when human
beings tell a story-sometimes the expression of things doesn't come out all
nice and neat. 

However, I want to rule out an alternative reading of the grammar that I
think is wrong, but if it's not wrong, then it makes the sentence cohere
grammatically. In the alternative reading, POLLOI is a quantitative
adjective and modifies PNEUMATA, not a substantive and the subject of the
sentence. The result (not pretty, but showing the relationships) would be:

"Because many unclean spirits, (in the case) of those who had (them), were
coming out crying with a loud voice".

That's not correct, is it?? Or is there yet a different way of analyzing
this sentence that makes it hang together grammatically?

 

Webb Mealy




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