At 11:49 PM -0600 2/25/97, James C. Clardy, Jr. wrote: >In our lectionary group today we were discussing acts 10:40,particularly... EDWKEN AUTON EMFANJ GENESQAI Someone read one of the translations which has something like this... "...he allowed him to appear." ??? Does that translation carry the force of the actual text? Here's what I'm struggling with: Did God raise Jesus or did Jesus make himself become visible? I believe GENESQAI is passive thus indicating action received by the subject rather than vice versa. << Jim, two points: (1) One of the little points of grammar I've found myself emphasizing more and more frequently happens to apply here: you tentatively identify GENESQAI as passive, but actually it is middle. If you have middle endings and you don't have a clear indication that the verb in question is being used in a passive sense (which most simply means it doesn't have the hUPO + genitive agent construction, although there certainly are passives without a clear expression of agent), then you ought to assume it is middle and assign it the meaning standard for the middle of that verb. In this case the verb GINOMAI only appears in the middle voice (although the root GEN/GON/GN does appear in an active verb like GENNAW) and normally means "become," "come into being," or--particularly in the aorist, is often an equivalent of EIMI which doesn't have an aorist tense. Here I think "to become manifest" is the basic and simple sense of EMFANH GENESQAI. (2) You ask, "Did God raise Jesus or did Jesus make himself become visible?" Acts 10:40 does not leave this at all in question: immediately prior to the clause you cite is TOUTON hO QEOS HGEIREN THi TRITHi hHMERAi KAI ... The text clearly says that God raised him, and given the phrasing, we surely ought to understand hO QEOS as continuing in force as the subject of EDWKEN--and I suspect that this EDWKEN, like the one we discussed in Rev. 3 yesterday, carries the idiomatic force of Heb. NATHAN rather than the normal sense of DIDWMI (older Greek regularly uses TIQHMI in this idiomatic sense of "establish" or "cause to be.") so the sense has to be " ... and made him become manifest." Carl W. Conrad Department of Classics, Washington University One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO, USA 63130 (314) 935-4018 cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cwc@oui.com WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/