From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 18 2000 - 07:22:04 EDT
At 1:00 PM -0600 4/17/00, John Barach wrote:
>When Matthew reports Peter's denial of Jesus, he says
>
> TOTE HRXATO KATAQEMATIZEIN KAI OMNUEIN OTI OUK OIDA
> TON ANQRWPON.
>
>The swearing of an oath here (OMNUEIN) is self-imprecation: Peter is
>calling for God to judge and punish him should he be lying when he says
>he does not know this man, Jesus.
>
>According to R. T. France (Tyndale), the cursing (KATAQEMATIZEIN) is
>different. Matthew doesn't say Peter called God's curse *on himself*,
>and KATAQEMATIZEIN "does not elsewhere refer to a curse on oneself
>except where (as in Acts 23:12, 14, 21) this is explicitly stated. Did
>Peter then actually pronounce a curse on Jesus (as later Christians were
>required to do as proof of their apostasy)? If Matthew and Mark have
>understandably refrained from stating this explicitly, it is the
>probably implication of the words they have used" (France 383).
>
>There seem to be three options (or some combination thereof):
>
>(1) Peter pronounced a curse on himself and the curse is virtually
>synonymous with the oath.
>
>(2) Peter pronounced a curse on Jesus. (Problem: France's
>"understandably refrained" to the contrary, would not Matthew have
>stated exactly what Peter did? After all, Matthew is describing the
>depths to which Jesus sank in his suffering and being rejected.)
>
>(3) Peter pronounced a curse on those who kept pestering him with
>questions.
>
>Does the verb itself really indicate that (1) is unlikely, as France
>suggests? Is there a grammatical reason for opting for any one of these
>three?
>
>Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
I don't know that this is any help whatsoever, and yet it strikes me as
consistent with observed human behavior in those who get caught in an
unbearable situation (in my area Southwestern Airlines runs television
commercials that begin with people finding themselves in extremely
embarrassing situations, often getting caught in a faux pas--like the woman
at a wedding who blurts out, just loud enough to be heard by everyone in
the church, "It'll never last"--at which point the automatic commercial
line takes over: "Want to get away? fly Southwest Airlines ..." What I'm
thinking of is the secularization of the language of cursing, whereby the
utterly frustrated and embarrassed person does wish he/she could vanish
beneath the floor or behind the wall or somehow escape the situation in
which he/she finds him/herself. In such a situation as that wherein Peter
finds himself, I can readily imagine a person saying, "God damn it! To hell
with you all! I don't KNOW the fellow!" And I can imagine that if the
person speaking this were asked later what he meant, he'd probably say he
had no idea in the world of these utterances as prayers he expected to be
heard and answered by God but that these utterances are standard
expressions of extreme frustration, and ought not to be taken as
imprecations in any serious religious sense. I've always understood this
scene in the gospels that way--that Peter wants nothing more than to escape
from a situation that finds him red-faced and helpless and yearning to be
back in Galilee. He may be feeling remorse for feeling that way already,
but his immediate reaction is the frustrated outcry of one who wants OUT of
this situation and uses the common language of the curse as a secular
expression of frustration. And I don't know why that isn't an adequate way
of understanding TOTE HRXATO KATAQEMATIZEIN KAI OMNUEIN OTI OUK OIDA TON
ANQRWPON. I can't prove it, but I think it's more likely than a literalist
religious understanding of these words, KATAQEMATIZEIN and OMNUEIN.
--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 WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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