This is not the first time I've come across this question, so I thought I would throw in my two cents. Actually I don't think I could address this any better than Brown Driver and Briggs can do it. But of course, one has to be willing to recognize the possibility of a semitism or semitic influences in this narrative use of kai - commonly overlooked in this argument, as opposed to simply declaring it parataxis of common speech (like my son's friend with whom he used to play in the front room in their early years and drive me nuts "and let's pretend this... and let's pretend that.... and let's pretend .....). After all, what was the author's principle language?
Speaking of two cases where there is the joining of the simple (weak) waw to the perfect....
'the feature common to them both is this - that the idiom employed, instead of representing a given event as arising out of or being a continuation of, some previous occurrence (in the manner of the idiom of the waw consecutive) represents it as standing on an independent groud of its own, as connected indeed with what precedes, but only externally and superficially, without any inner (grammatical) bond of union existing between them; in a word, it causes the narrative to advance not by development but by accretion (in the visual semitic mind a very important concept to understand).
Accordingly we find ti used :
1 - upon occasions when a writer wishes to place two facts in co-ordination with one another , to exhibit the second as simultaneous with the first rather than as succeeding it; for instance, in the conjunction of two synonymous or similar ideas: and
2 - chiefly in the LATER BOOKS, when the language was allowing itself gradually to acquiese in and adopt the mode of speech customary in the Aramaic dialects current at the time around Palestine (from the 3rd century) in which the waw consecutive was NEVER employed.
In otherwords, what I'm saying is this: where short sentences occur with the linkage of the copulatives, Mt 27.53 is a perfect example of this, don't overlook what I call the "three- ringed circus effect". The prep. phrase and the use of idou undeniably provides a significant sequence of events. But the kai linkage relates all the events, the resurrection of "the many" a frequentative action, in a way that should be taken together to draw a grand picture of events. I suspect we have here the precursor thinking to many of our great works of art.
Regards,
Brian
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> Pondering this passage and its immediate context raised a question in my
> mind about temporal sequence and the use of KAI. When a NT author is
> describing an event that transpired over several days and the description
> takes the form of a long string of clauses connected with KAI (only KAI), is
> it
> safe to assume that the author intended the sequence of clauses to be
> understood as a strict chronological sequence?
>
> There are more explicit ways of indicating chronological order than the use
> of KAI by itself (e.g. particles and adverbs). When these more explicit means
> of marking chronology are absent, what can we assume about the order in
> which things took place?
>
> Clay Bartholomew
> Three Tree Point
>
>
>
>