[B-Greek] Dr. Wallace on Acts 13.48

Brian Abasciano bvabasciano at gmail.com
Mon Aug 3 01:46:37 EDT 2009


Here are some excellent comments from Carl Conrad posted on B-Greek some time ago. There's a lot more that could be said, but it's late and I should get going:

"I argued that HSAN TETAGMENOI EIS ZWHN AIWNION should be understood as a 
"stative" construction. I did, in the summer of '99, stick with "were 
appointed/ordained to eternal life" as a translation that retains something 
of the literal sense of the verb TASSW when TETAGMENOI HSAN gets translated 
into English. But the more I've thought about it the more inclined I am to 
think that in the English of our own time, a better phrasing might be, 
"those who were 'in line' for eternal life believed.

"Now it occurs to me that we ought to pay more attention to the fact that 
HSAN TETAGMENOI is middle or passive (I'd say middle and that might well 
involve us in another discussion; some might even want to bring in that old 
category of "divine passive" but I'd rather not. When I say we ought to pay 
more attention to the fact that this is middle or passive, all I mean is 
that the author clearly is not concerned to make a statement about how it 
happened that these particular Gentiles were "ordained to eternal life" or 
about WHO ordained them to eternal life--he wants to say only that they 
were in this state of being "in line" and so believed. 

"I really don't think anything more is meant by this phrase than we mean by 
saying "All those who were prepared for the test passed it with flying 
colors." Nothing is said about who prepared the persons in question, 
whether they had hit the midnight oil for several nights in a row or 
someone had given them half a dozen help sessions to make sure that they 
understood all the problems on which they would be examined. What the 
phrasing says is nothing more than "those who were ready for the test 
passed it" and of course it's also implied that "those who weren't ready 
didn't pass it." 

"I would like to think that matters regarding this verse are that simple and 
that there's no need to make this verse the buttress for more than it 
actually says."



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