As I reflected upon this message, it occurred to me that one passage that
might have been appealed to for this usage of PAS in the sense of 'most' or
'many' could be Mark 1:5-- KAI EXEPOREUETO PROS AUTON PASA hH IOUDAIA CWRA
KAI hOI hIEROSOLUMITAI PANTES, ..., certainly interesting phrasing,
precisely because it seems to be stating as a precise fact what on the
surface is not readily credible: that all the people of Judea and all the
citizens of Jerusalem came to John the Baptist. I think commentators really
want to water this down and say it doesn't really mean what it says, that
surely it means "people from all over Judea" came to John the Baptist, and
"just about everybody from Jerusalem" came to John the Baptist. I don't
know of any other passage where it could be argued that PAS doesn't really
mean "all" or is used in the casual sort of exaggerating way we say, "Why
you ought to have been there! Everybody was there" or "Everybody who is
anybody was there"--or the casual way a Frenchman will talk about "tout le
monde" when he really thinks that 50,000 Frenchmen can't be wrong even when
there are some outside the 50,000 who have a different opinion.
Yet I must say, that I have always wondered about this Marcan text and had
a powerful suspicion that Mark meant these phrases, "the whole territory of
Judea and all the people of Jerusalem" to indicate that the confrontation
of John the Baptist was in fact with the whole people of Israel--and just
as Mark does not say that this was some particular ERHMOS where John the
Baptist preached and baptized, perhaps he means that the historical
encounter between John the Baptist and the nation of Israel had cosmic
eschatological dimensions, and for that reason he does not try to give his
phraseology that precise verisimilitude one looks for in a careful narrator
of actual events, but instead he says "And John appeared in the wilderness,
preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." And then,
starkly, "and all the land of Judea and all the Jerusalemites would go out
to him ..." I can't help feeling that if this is an exaggeration, it is a
very deliberate one.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics/Washington University
One Brookings Drive/St. Louis, MO, USA 63130/(314) 935-4018
Home: 7222 Colgate Ave./St. Louis, MO 63130/(314) 726-5649
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/