At 9:44 AM -0400 7/16/97, Clayton Bartholomew wrote: >A highly dubious reading appears in D in Acts 6:7, the particle AN appears to >be inserted after the last verb: > >. . . POLUS TE OCLOS TWN IERWN UPHKOUON AN THi PISTEI. > >The editors don't agree on what appears here. Ropes has *A.* and Scrivner >has *AU* and Alford has *AN*. I am not interested particularly in resolving >the textual question, I have a question about syntax. > >Assuming that *AN* appears as it is shown above in Acts 6:7, what would >*AN* be doing here? I searched for an hour through my grammars and read >all the articles on this particle and came up with a blank. This placement of >AN seems to violate the rules. Is there any way *reading* AN in this position >and making it scan as a Greek clause? (1) So far as position is concerned, there's nothing wrong with AN following a verb like that--it's quite regular in the apodosis of a condition and would be found regularly following an imperfect indicative in any ordinary present counter-factual condition. (2) The only sense I could see in this use of imperfect with AN is "iterative": "They would give heed to the faith." This is a classical usage for which see Smyth #1790, but BDF #367 says, "The classical iterative past tense with AN in main clauses is only incidentally similar [to AN in subordinate relative and temporal clauses], and is found neither in the NT nor in ordinary Koine." So it may be that the copyist in this MS is aping the classical "iterative" construction, but that's the only possibility I can think of. Not much help, I guess. Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics/Washington University One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018 Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(704) 675-4243 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/