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

Iver Larsen iver_larsen at sil.org
Sat Aug 11 02:47:40 EDT 2007


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Webb" <webb at selftest.net>


> 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 is indeed a rather strange grammar. Metzger considers various options and 
conjectures (including changing POLLOI to POLLA) in his Textual Commentary, 
but ends up rejecting them all and accepting that this is just strange 
grammar.

Hovewer, he does not seriously consider the possibility that the word POLLOI 
was copied by mistake into p75 and subsequently came into many Alexandrian 
and some Western witnesses, and that the alternative reading found in the 
Byzantine majority text is a viable grammatical possibility. I won't 
evaluate the merits of the manuscript evidence, but comment on the 
alternative reading which is

POLLWN GAR TWN ECONTWN PNEUMATA AKAQARTA BOWNTA FWNHi MEGALHi EXHRCETO

A few manuscripts have POLLWN plus the plural EXHRCONTO, but this may be a 
mistaken "correction" caused by the plural subject. The singular is the 
expected form with a neuter plural, and in fact, Luke never uses the plural 
form of this verb with a neuter plural subject. That is another reason why 
the EXHRCONTO reading is grammatically suspect in Acts, since POLLOI cannot 
be the logical subject for it.
Compare:
Luke 4:41 EXHRCETO DE KAI DAIMONIA APO POLLWN KRAZONTA
Luke 8:2 MAGDALHNH AF' hHS DAIMONIA hEPTA EXELHLUQEI
Luke 8:35 AF' hOU TA DAIMONIA EXHLQEN
Luke 8:38 AF' hOU EXELHLUQEI TA DAIMONIA

For the alternative reading with POLLWN, the PNEUMATA AKAQARTA becomes the 
subject, or you could say it does double duty as subject for the final verb 
and object for ECONTWN.
Now I would have expected an APO before POLLWN, and ms D rather clumsily 
changes to APO POLLOIS (!).
But there are cases where the ablative genitive can stand without the 
expected preposition, e.g.
Mat 13:1 EN THi hHMERAi EKEINHi EXELQWN hO IHSOUS THS OIKIAS

The lack of a preposition has apparently caused some mss to insert APO here, 
others to insert EK.

Maybe the APO is left out because of the emphatic front position of POLLWN? 
Or is it akward in Greek to start a sentence with a preposion? Even though 
APO does not occur before GAR in the GNT, other prepositions do.
With this text, the translation would be something like: For evil spirits 
came out screaming in a loud voice from many of those (people) who had them.
This is close to the NRSV rendering above.

Iver Larsen




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