Acts 10:25

Acts 10:25

The expansion in the Western text of this verse appears to have arisen from reflecting upon the difficulty involved in the ordinary text, that Cornelius could not have known exactly when to go out to meet Peter and to summon his kinsmen and close friends to his home. The text of D, supported by it^gig syr^hmg cop^G67 and in part by it^p and other Latin witnesses, reads: proseggi,zontoj de. tou/ Pe,trou eivj th.n Kaisa,rian prodramw.n ei-j tw/n dou,lwn diesa,fhsen paragegone,nai auvto,n) o` de. Kornh,lioj evkphdh,saj kai.…(“And as Peter was drawing near to Caesarea, one of the servants ¹⁹¹ ran ahead and announced that he had arrived. And Cornelius jumped up and …”). ¹⁹²

¹⁹¹ The servant, as it seems, is one of the two whom Cornelius had sent to fetch Peter (verses Acts 10:7 and Acts 10:23), and not one posted by Cornelius to watch for the apostle’s coming (as E. J. Epp suggests. The Theological Tendency of Codex Bezae Cantabrigiensis in Acts, p. 161), nor one of Peter’s own servants (as R. P. C. Hanson assumes, New Testament Studies, XII [1965—66], p. 221).

¹⁹² For a discussion of the difficulties in both the Alexandrian and the Western forms of text, see Peter Corssen in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen, CLVIII (1896), pp. 437 f.