Re: Participle as Finite Verb

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sat Jul 11 1998 - 16:48:32 EDT


At 12:24 PM +0000 7/11/98, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>James Hardy Ropes and Bruce Manning Metzger agree that Codex Beza's omission
>of APELUSAN in Acts 13:3 ruins the syntax of the verse. Now when Ropes and
>Metzger agree who would dare to question?
>
>I am wondering if the Acts 13:3 in Codex Beza is really impossible to read.
>
>TOTE NHSTEUSANTES KAI PROSEUXAMENOI PANTES
>KAI EPIQENTES TAS CEIRAS AUTOIS
>
>If we were left with only this text of Acts 13:3, I suspect we could find a
>way to make sense out of it.
>If we read the first two participles as circumstantial and the second KAI as
>an adverb then EPIQENTES might function as a finite verb. This is reaching a
>little. The second KAI is a problem. The received text (NA27) is much easier
>to scan. Perhaps Luke's exemplary style makes us intolerant of irregularities
>that we might accept if they appeared in 2nd Peter or Jude.
>
>I have been working through some passages in Agamemnon where one is forced to
>mount siege works against the text to coerce some meaning out of it. For
>example lines 105-107 where J.D. Denniston comments "the following jumble of
>words . . . defies interpretation." By comparison to this Acts 13:3 in Codex
>Bezae doesn't really look all that impossible.

If you had Codex Bezae and perhaps two other MSS of Acts, you might be in a
better position to compare the Agamemnon of Aeschylus and the book of Acts,
but it still wouldn't be a very fair comparison, inasmuch as Aeschylus (and
his contemporary, Pindar) wrote the most difficult of Greek verse to be
found in antiquity and Luke wrote one of the clearest of prose styles. I
don't believe for a moment that Luke would have written a participle to
stand in for a finite verb. No way (IMHO).

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/

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