Lk 11:8 Whose ANAIDEIA?

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 09 1995 - 15:56:24 EDT


I'd like to put to the list a question brought me this morning by a student
who said that the parable in Lk 11:5-8 was preached by a seminarian from a
local area seminary (which shall remain nameless to protect both the
innocent and the guilty) who argued that the ANAIDEIA in verse 11 refers
not to the "friend" who knocks repeatedly on a man's door in the middle of
the night when he claims that he and his children are abed to ask for a
loaf of bread, but rather to the housekeeper who doesn't want to come to
the door to share the loaf of bread. The relevant text is as follows:

        LEGW hUMIN, EI KAI OU DWSEI AUTWi ANASTAS DIA TO EINAI FILON AUTOU,
        DIA GE THN A N A I D E I A N A U T O U EGERQEIS DWSEI AUTWi hOSWN
        XRHiZEI.

What was suggested was that the AUTOU in the marked text above refers to
the householder himself--it is the householder who is shameless rather than
his friend who's persistently knocks on his door.

To me this is a novel view and I don't really see anything in favor of it
in the context. Moreover it seems to me that "good" Greek should be using
hEAUTOU or hAUTOU in place of AUTOU to refer this pronoun to the subject of
its clause. However, I don't think Koine is always strict on this matter of
distinguishing the reflexive pronoun from the normal 3rd-person pronoun,
for which reason it seems to me that, although unlikely, the interpretation
offered above is plausible at least in terms of Greek grammar. Would anyone
like to play devil's advocate and argue that AUTOU in fact does refer to
the sleeper householder?

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/



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