Re: ANISTHMI & EGEIRW

Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Sun, 17 Nov 1996 05:53:36 -0600

At 9:39 PM -0600 11/16/96, Richard Arthur <LISATIA@aol.com> wrote:
>dear friends,
> i hesitate to enter a discussion of anisthmi and egeirw, an old chestnut
>that has been studied by more learned minds than ours in days of yore. The
>outstanding peculiarity, however, is that Matthew's gospel seems to have been
>purged of any use of anisthmi to refer to Jesus' resurrection; cf. Mt. 16.21
>(and par.), 17.9 (and par), 17.23 (and par), and 20.19 (and par).
> George Howard's book, "A Hebrew Gospel of Matthew", reads "ahmad" (ayin,
>mem, daleth) in all of these Matthean passages, a word which usually stands
>for Gk. anisthmi. Moveover, in several other places, "ahmad" ooccurs where
>it would not be expected, e.g., 26.69 where Peter "stands" (not "sits") by
>the fire warming himself (John 18.25 has "estws"), and 28.2 where an angel
>"stood" by the rock (not "sits on it").
> Why would the strong verb anisthmi, "stand up", be replaced by the
>passive of egieiw, "was raised up"?
> I have a possible answer which borders on fantasy. The successor of
>Jesus among the Samaritan gnostics was a man who styled himself "the Standing
>One", hO hESTWS". This title, it seems, was one that had been passed on from
>John the Baptist, to Dositheus, to Simon, according to the Pseudo-Clementine
>literature (Hennecke, 1965, v. ii, 548).
> Possibly, a revision of the Gospel of Matthew was produced to undermine
>any talk that Jesus had "raised himself" from the dead. In the process,
>Peter had to sit in the couryard, and the angel "sat on the rock".

Richard:

Thanks for this information. I don't quite know what to make of it, I
confess. I was aware that the use of the two verbs, HGERQH and ANESTH, for
Jesus' resurrection had been evaluated, although I can't recall where I
read it (perhaps in Reginald Fuller's book on the resurrection
traditions?), but this is altogeher weird. Ist links up also with the
question of an original Hebrew or Aramaic form of Matthew's gospel, in
accordance with the cryptic reported statement of Papias. I wonder if
Stephen Carlson, who has not been heard from much recently--on B-Greek, at
least, would care to comment on this theory?

Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130
(314) 935-4018
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/