Acts 4:31

Acts 4:31

At the end of the verse codex Bezae and some other witnesses (including E, certain Greek manuscripts known to Bede, vg^{3 mss} cop^G67 Irenaeus Ephraem Augustine) add, a little naࡢvely but conformably to the spirit of the recital, panti. tw|/ qe,lonti pisteu,ein (“to every one who wished to believe”). According to Rendel Harris,

“Its origin is evidently an attempt to assimilate the fulfilment of the prayer to the prayer itself which is in v. Acts 4:29

meta.	pa,shj	parrhsi,aj	lalei/n	to.n lo,gon	sou
cum	fiducia	omni	loqui	verbum	tuum.

Hence we expect naturally the addition of pa,shj, and a number of MSS. show it. (For example, the Gigas reads loquebantur verbum dei cum omni fiducia.) This is the cause of the omni at the beginning of the gloss; but this omni separated from fiducia by the line division has been read as a dative, and turned back into Greek as panti, with the result that it has itself become the subject of expansion, in order to limit the extravagance of the statement and to round off the sentence.” ¹²⁶

Although one may have reservations about the validity of the several steps in Harris’s ingenious theory, the words nevertheless are obviously an accretion to the text.

¹²⁶ Four Lectures on the Western Text of the New Testament (London, 1894), pp. 89 f.