Acts 17:12

Acts 17:12

After beginning the verse with a rather banal observation, tine.j me.n ou=n auvtw/n evpi,steusan( ti,nej de. hvpi,sthsan (“Some of them, therefore, believed, but some did not believe,” cf. Acts 28:24), codex Bezae smooths the grammar of the generally received text and reads kai. tw/n ~Ellh,nwn kai. tw/n euvschmo,nwn a;ndrej kai. gunai/kej i`kanoi. evpi,steusan (“and many of the Greeks and men and women of high standing believed”). Besides being better Greek the readjusted order has the effect of lessening any importance given to women (cf. comments on ver. 34 and on 18.26). According to Menoud, “the antifeminist tendency of the writer of D seems to be more or less general in the last decades of the first century. In any case it is not one of the major trends in the thought of the Western recension.” ³²²

³²² P. H. Menoud, “The Western Text and the Theology of Acts,” in the Bulletin of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, II (1951), pp. 30 f.; compare Ropes, The Text of Acts, p. ccxxxiv, who finds in Acts 17:12 and chap. Acts 18:1 several indications of what may fairly be called an “anti-feminist” tendency. See also Metzger, The Text of the New Testament, 3rd ed., pp. 295 f.