Jonathan
At 08:07 AM 11/19/96 -0600, you wrote:
>At 7:18 AM -0600 11/19/96, Jonathan Robie wrote:
>>The Greek for this doesn't seem to match the Gideon Bible in my hotel room,
>>which says "Glory be to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, goodwill
>>toward men". My Greek text says:
>>
>>Luke 2:14 (GNT) doksa en uyistois qew kai epi ghs eirhnh en anqrwpois
>>eudokias.
>>
>>I translate this as "Glory be to the most high God, and peace to men of good
>>will". Am I missing something here? I don't know what other translations
>>say; my laptop doesn't have an internal CD-ROM, and the external is too big
>>to carry, so I trust the Gideons to supply me with an English Bible in the
>>hotel room.
>
>The reading EUDOKIAS has the best MS support and has been accepted in
>recent versions of the GNT (although perhaps not in the so-called "Majority
>Text" which follows the Textus Receptus pretty closely). I won't cite the
>MSS in the apparatus which anyone can check, but Metzger's note, which is
>very illuminating, says about this.
>
> "The genitive case, which is the more difficult reading, is
>supported by the oldest representatives of the Alexandrian and the Western
>group of witnesses. The rise of the nominative reading can be explained
>either as an amelioration of the sense or as a palaeographical oversight
>(at the end of a line EUDOKIAS would differ from EUDOKIA only by the
>presence of the smallest possible lunar sigma, little more than a point,
>for which it might have been taken ...
> "The meaning seems to be, not that divine peace can be bestowed
>only where human good will is already present, but that at the birth of the
>Saviour God's peace rests on those whom he has chosen in accord with his
>good pleasure. Prior argued that 'men of [God's] good pleasure' is an
>unusual, if not impossible, expression in Hebrew. Now, however, that
>equivalent expressions have turned up in Hebrew in several Qumran Hymns
>('the sons of his [Gods] good pleasure,' 1 QH iv.32f.; xi.9; and 'the elect
>of his [God's] good pleasure,' viii.6) it can be regarded as a genuinely
>Semitic construction in a section of Luke (chaps 1 and 2) characterized by
>Semitizing constructions."
>
>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/
>
>
>
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Jonathan Robie
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