Acts 8:7

Acts 8:7

The grammar of the reading that is attested by the earlier and better witnesses (polloi. ga.r tw/n evco,ntwn pneu,mata avka,qarta bow/nta fwnh|/ mega,lh| evxh,rconto( î⁷⁴ a A B C al) is strained, for the author begins with polloi, as the subject and pneu,mata avka,qarta as object of tw/n evco,ntwn, and then proceeds as though pneu,mata were the subject of the main verb evxh,rconto (“For many of those who had unclean spirits, crying with a loud voice they came out”). In order to improve the syntax scribes altered the nominativus pendens into polloi/j (so codex Bezae) ¹⁷³ or pollw/n (so H P al cop^bo arm Chrysostom); the latter reading passed into the Textus Receptus.

Modern scholars, dissatisfied with the anacoluthon and recognizing that pollw/n is a secondary development, have proposed several conjectural emendations. For example, Lachmann suggested that polla, should be read instead of polloi,. ¹⁷⁴ Blass, followed by Hilgenfeld, thought that a[ had fallen out after avka,qarta; with the relative pronoun restored, polloi, is to be construed (along with the following polloi,) as the subject of evqerapeu,qhsan.

On the other hand, however, Torrey argued that the Greek, rough though it is, ought not to be emended, since it represents the conjectural Aramaic original, in which the suspended construction is not unusual. ¹⁷⁵

Irrespective of one’s view concerning the hypothetical Aramaic original, it is perhaps best to retain the anacoluthon and to conclude, with Lake and Cadbury, that we have here “one of those tricks of mental ‘telescoping’ to which all writers are liable,” and that, as such, “it is one of several indications in the text that it was never finally revised.” ¹⁷⁶

¹⁷³ Before polloi/j there is an erasure in D; Wetstein read avpo. polloi/j a prima manu; Scrivener was inclined to read p@ar#a,; and Blass thought that the scribe wrote p@am# (Theologische Studien und Kritiken, LXXXI [1898], p. 540).

¹⁷⁴ Preface in his Novum Testamentum graece et latine, 2nd ed., vol. II (Berlin, 1850), p. viii.

¹⁷⁵ The Composition and Date of Acts, pp. 33 f.

¹⁷⁶ The Beginnings of Christianity, vol. IV, p. 90; cf. also Cadbury’s discussion, “Four Features of Lucan Style,” in Studies in Luke-Acts, ed. by Leander E. Keck and J. Louis Martyn (New York, 1966), pp. 87—102.