From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Tue Feb 24 1998 - 14:43:08 EST
At 5:01 AM -0600 2/24/98, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>Studying the account of Paul's conversion, I have run into two noteworthy
>items in Acts 9:18ff.
>
>The first item is the position of AUTOU in the phrase APEPESAN AUTOU APO TWN
>OFQALMWN. I am prepared to accept that a possessive pronoun may precede it's
>noun but I was not quite prepared for this kind of separation. It seemed
>rather harsh to have a possessive pronoun modify a noun in a prepositional
>phrase following the pronoun. My surprise at this construction is just one
>more piece of evidence that I still have a "tin ear" when it comes to NT
>greek. According to BDF 473.1 this construction is nothing to be alarmed
>about. There is another clear example in Mat. 8:8 which reads MOU hUPO THN
>STEGHN. This is not an emphatic position according to BDF 473.1.
There may be other views, but I'd be inclined personally to understand that
AUTOU as an immediate ablatival genitive complement to APEPESAN clarified
by the following APO TWN OFQALMWN: "fell from him from the eyes"; i.e., I
don't really think it's a possessive pronoun at all.
>The second item that shocked me was the phrase TE KAI ANASTAS EBAPTISQH. Did
>Luke leave out some important details here, like the fact that there was a
>river flowing through the middle of this house? Was this a large house with a
>court and a pool, like the Roman mansions? There is no mention of the means by
>which Paul EBAPTISQH.
Yes, he was baptized in the Stables of Augeas as reconditioned and cleaned
up by Heracles. On the other hand, I think that as a narrator, Luke expands
some narratives and condenses others; I think the details are in fact
omitted here in favor of the salient facts.
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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat Apr 20 2002 - 15:39:06 EDT