Re: Nominativas Pendens?

From: Carl W. Conrad (cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sun Jan 11 1998 - 14:28:45 EST


At 3:06 AM -0600 1/11/98, clayton stirling bartholomew wrote:
>I read Acts 8:7a, POLLOI . . . EXHRCONTO at least a dozen times before I
>figured out what was going on. It appears that PNEUMATA AKAQARTA is
>functioning as the accusative object of the participle ECONTWN as well as the
>subject of the verb EXHRCONTO. This seemed a little odd to me. So after a
>nights sleep, I looked at it again and decided to check some reference books.
>I found a good discussion of this passage in Metzger's textual commentary (1st
>ed).
>
>Metzger said that POLLOI (1st occurrence) is a "Nominativas Pendens." After
>doing some review on the nominative absolute, I am not sure how this solves
>the problems associated with this passage. Can anyone explain this to me?
>
>Codex Bezae reads POLLOIS for POLLOI, which Metzger says is an attempt to
>make this passage more readable. Again, I don't see how POLLOIS clarifies the
>syntax here. Can anyone explain this to me?
>
>Metzger mentions that several conjectural emendations have been suggested for
>making this passage readable. If I had been a scribe trying to disambiguate
>this passage I would have changed ECONTWN to a finite verb and inserted a
>conjunction after AKAQARTA. If you had been a scribe who wanted to clarify
>this verse how would you had done it?

What Metzger actually says is that the passage is an anacoluthon (beginning
of 2nd par. of his comment: "Modern scholars, dissatisfied with the
anacoluthon ...") and that's what it is. He does call the initial POLLOI a
"Nominativus Pendens" (at least he had the participle and the noun in the
Latin in agreement) but by that he doesn't mean that there's a nominative
absolute (a construction which I don't think really exists in Greek,
although I have heard Joshua Whatmough argue that an accusative absolute,
since it always involves a neuter participle the accusative of which is
morphologically identical with its nominative, should better be understood
as a 'nominative absolute')--but what I think he means by so terming it is
that it's left hanging there without properly functioning as an
intelligible subject to EXHRCONTO.

What would be achieved by the POLLOIS as a dative of reference (or sentence
dative) is a deeper muddying of the wasters: the phrase PNEUMATA AKAQARTA
functioning as an accusative object of ECONTWN must then also function as a
nominative subject of EXHERCONTO (unless one see it as implicit either
first as the object or the second time as the subject) thus: "For in the
case of many of those having unclean spirits, the unclean spirits would
come out screaming in a loud voice ..." But I can't recall offhand
instances of this sort of dative, which is common enough in classical
Attic, in the Koine of the GNT. So I think Metzger is right: the POLLOIS is
explicable as an attempt to make the received early MSS text look less
awkward then it is, but it resolves one problem by creating a second one
and therefore, much as we would like to have a more intelligible text (at
least in terms of the ordinary patterns of Greek grammar), we still have
something that it's hard to believe that as good a writer as Luke would
have written. What is meant is pretty clearly: "Many had unclean spirits
that came forth from them screaming with a loud shout"--but the Greek as it
stands cannot quite be forced into saying that. We are left with a text put
into the shape in which we have received it either by an author or by a
copyist who has "left unwritten what should have been written and/or
written what should not have been written" and "there is no health" in the
text as it stands. And that's exactly what an anacoluthon is: a grammatical
non sequitur.

>"If you throw a rock from a Pullman traveling anywhere in America you are
>likely to hit a Dallas grad." H. L. Mencken*
>
>*(a dynamic equivalence translation.)

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/



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