Acts 1:4

Acts 1:4 sunalizo,menoj

The textual problems involving sunalizo,menoj and its variants are less perplexing than the lexical considerations concerning the meaning of the word. All known uncial manuscripts, with the possible exception of D, and the overwhelming majority of the minuscule manuscripts read sunalizo,menoj. The first hand of codex Bezae reads sunalisko,menoj metV auvtw/n, which has been corrected by a subsequent hand to sunalisgo,menoj metV auvtw/n. Since, however, the meaning of sunali,skesqai is intolerable in the context (the verb means to be taken captive together), and since &sk& (as well as &sg&) is not far phonetically from &z&, Ropes is justified in correcting the spelling to sunalizo,menoj in his transcription of the manuscript. About thirty-five minuscule manuscripts, including 614 (which is a relatively important witness to the Western text) and several manuscripts of family 1 (e.g. 1, 69), as well as many patristic witnesses, read sunaulizo,menoj, a verb that means literally to spend the night with, and then also generally to be with, to stay with.

The Committee agreed that the manuscript evidence requires the adoption of the reading sunalizo,menoj. This verb, spelled with a long a, is common in classical and Hellenistic Greek and means collect or assemble. The same verb, spelled with a short a, means eat with (literally, eat salt with another). This meaning is extremely rare in Greek literature; it does not appear before the end of the second century after Christ, and no example has turned up in the papyri. ⁵² Many of the early versions took the word in this sense; it is found in the Old Latin, the Vulgate, the Coptic (both Sahidic and Bohairic), the Peshitta and the Harclean Syriac, the Armenian, and the Ethiopic.

Since the use of sunali,zesqai in its regular sense to assemble, gather is awkward when only one person is mentioned, and particularly awkward in its use in ver. Acts 1:4 where the present tense is joined with the aorist parh,ggeilen auvtoi/j, and since, as was mentioned above, sunali,zesqai in the sense to eat with is unknown in the first Christian century, it has been proposed to regard sunalizo,menoj as an orthographic variant for sunaulizo,menoj. This theory, which Cadbury supported with many examples of similar exchange of &a& and &au&, ⁵³ was adopted by the RSV and the NRSV (“while staying with them”).

The conjectural emendation proposed by I. A. Heikel ⁵⁴ to read sunalizome,noij, suggested previously by T. Hemsterhusius (whom Heikel does not mention), is only superficially attractive, for if Luke had originally written the dative plural he would not have been likely to follow it two words later with auvtoi/j. (The passage in Luke 8:4 that Heikel adduces as a parallel is not pertinent, for it has nothing corresponding to auvtoi/j.)

⁵² The statement is based on information kindly supplied by Prof. Herbert C. Youtie of the University of Michigan, who, at the request of the present writer, consulted his comprehensive index verborum of the Greek papyri.

⁵³ H. J. Cadbury, “Lexical Notes on Luke-Acts; III, Luke’s Interest in Lodging,” Journal of Biblical Literature, XLV (1926), pp. 310—317. For a discussion of various possible Semitic words lying behind the Greek, see Max Wilcox, The Semitisms of Acts (Oxford, 1965), pp. 106 ff.

⁵⁴ “Konjekturen zu einigen Stellen des neutestamentlichen Textes,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken, CVI (1934—35), p. 314.