A Textual Commentary On The Greek NT

Acts 13:33

Acts 13:33 @auvtw/n# h`mi/n {C}

Although h`mw/n is by far the best attested reading, it gives a most improbable sense (since the promise was made to the fathers, we expect to read that it was fulfilled, not “to our children” but “to their children”). ²⁶⁶ On the other hand, both auvtw/n and auvtw/n h`mi/n are so eminently appropriate that if either had been the original reading, one cannot understand how the readings h`mw/n and h`mi/n could have arisen.

Several conjectural emendations have been proposed, including evfV h`mw/n (“in our time”) by Lachmann ²⁶⁷ and evkpeplh,rwken h`mi/n kai. toi/j te,knoij h`mw/n by Chase, ²⁶⁸ who compares Acts 2:39. While the scribe of ms. 142 (eleventh century) has preserved what many regard as the correct reading, he has done so only, so to speak, accidentally or by a happy conjecture. At the same time it is possible to argue that the reading auvtw/n h`mi/n in the great majority of witnesses is a conflate reading and therefore presents a strong presumption for the early existence of the reading h`mi/n.

The Committee, though agreeing with Hort’s judgment that “it can hardly be doubted that h`mw/n is a primitive corruption of h`mi/n,” ²⁶⁹ felt compelled by the predominance of external evidence to print auvtw/n h`mi/n, but, in view of the transcriptional considerations mentioned above, to enclose auvtw/n within square brackets. Besides the customary rendering of auvtw/n h`mi/n, it has been proposed to take h`mi/n with what follows and to translate, “This promise God has fulfilled for the children, having for us raised up Jesus” (so W. F. Burnside, The Acts of the Apostles [Cambridge, 1916], p. 163).

²⁶⁶ G. D. Kilpatrick, who adopts h`mw/n, suggests that here the author himself made a slip of the pen and wrote nonsense (“An Eclectic Study of the Text of Acts,” Biblical and Patristic Studies in Memory of Robert Pierce Casey, edited by J. Neville Birdsall and Robert W. Thomson [Freiburg, 1963], p. 74).

²⁶⁷ Preface to his 2nd edition, vol. II, p. ix.

²⁶⁸ F. H. Chase, The Credibility of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles (London, 1902), p. 187, n. 1.

²⁶⁹ “Notes on Select Readings,” p. 95. With Hort agree, e.g., Souter (Expositor, Eighth Series, X [1915], p. 438), Ropes (The Text of Acts, p. 124), Haenchen (Commentary, ad loc.), and Evald Lövestam (Son and Saviour [Lund, 1961], pp. 7—8).

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A Textual Commentary On The Greek NT

Acts 13:33

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