>A highly dubious reading appears in D in Acts 6:7, the particle AN
appears to
>be inserted after the last verb:
>
>. . . POLUS TE OCLOS TWN IERWN UPHKOUON AN THi PISTEI.
>
>The editors don't agree on what appears here. Ropes has *A.* and
Scrivner
>has *AU* and Alford has *AN*. I am not interested particularly in
resolving
>the textual question, I have a question about syntax.
>
>Assuming that *AN* appears as it is shown above in Acts 6:7, what
would
>*AN* be doing here? I searched for an hour through my grammars and
read
>all the articles on this particle and came up with a blank. This
placement of
>AN seems to violate the rules. Is there any way *reading* AN in this
position
>and making it scan as a Greek clause?
(1) So far as position is concerned, there's nothing wrong with AN
following a verb like that--it's quite regular in the apodosis of a
condition and would be found regularly following an imperfect
indicative in any ordinary present counter-factual condition.
(2) The only sense I could see in this use of imperfect with AN is
"iterative": "They would give heed to the faith." This is a classical
usage for which see Smyth #1790, but BDF #367 says, "The classical
iterative past tense with AN in <italic>main clauses</italic> is only
incidentally similar [to AN in subordinate relative and temporal
clauses], and is found neither in the NT nor in ordinary Koine."
So it may be that the copyist in this MS is aping the classical
"iterative" construction, but that's the only possibility I can think
of.
Not much help, I guess.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(704) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
</x-rich>