Acts 16:12

Acts 16:12 prw,th@j# meri,doj th/j {D}

The oldest form of text in the extant Greek witnesses appears to be prw,th th/j meri,doj Makedoni,aj po,lij, “a first city of the district of Macedonia.” Hort denied that meri,j could ever denote a geographical division, and for this, and other reasons, regarded the passage as primitively corrupt. Subsequent to Hort, however, examples of such a geographical usage have turned up in papyri, in an inscription, and in late writers. ³¹⁶ But what is the meaning of prw,th? (1) Against the translation “chief” city (AV) is the fact that not Philippi but Thessalonica was acknowledged to be the chief city of Macedonia and Amphipolis the chief city of the district in which Philippi was situated. (2) Some have suggested that the author means that Philippi was the first Macedonian city to which Paul and his companions came in that district. But as a matter of fact the apostle first set foot in Neapolis, which apparently belonged to the same district as Philippi. Furthermore, apart from questions of geography one may well wonder why, on this interpretation of the meaning of prw,th, Luke should have wished to call attention to something so inconsequential to his narrative. (3) In view of the use of prw,th as a title of honor (found on coins of Pergamum and Smyrna as well as in inscriptions referring to Thessalonica), Lake and Cadbury translate the passage, “Philippi, which is a first city of the district of Macedonia, a colony.” In their comments, however, they point out that as a definite title the word has been found so far only in the cases of cities that were members of a koino,n (league or union) in their particular province, and were not Roman colonies at the time. Since Philippi does not qualify in either respect, they conclude that it is more probable that “the meaning of prw,th in this passage is simply ‘a leading city’” (the rendering subsequently adopted by the RSV).

The difficulties involved in the reading prw,th led to attempts at correction in other branches of the tradition. Among these, however, prw,th meri,j is impossible because a city cannot be called a meri,j. The omission of th/j meri,doj results in calling Philippi prw,th th/j Makedoni,aj po,lij, which merely increases the problem, as does also the curious replacement of prw,th by kefalh,, which is generally explained as a Latinism (rendering caput) or which may suggest influence from Syriac, where means both “head” and “foremost.” ³¹⁷

Dissatisfied for various reasons with all these readings in Greek witnesses, a majority of the Committee preferred to adopt the conjecture proposed by a number of scholars from Le Clerc to Blass and Turner, ³¹⁸ namely to read prw,thj for prw,th th/j, with the resultant meaning, “a city of the first district of Macedonia.” Those who adopt this conjecture usually explain the origin of the commonly received text (prw,th th/j meri,doj) as due either (a) to the accidental reduplication of the letters th, or (b) to a misunderstanding of the correction if by mistake a copyist had written prw,th and then &thj were written over it to correct it. (The reading prw,thj meri,doj is paralleled by primae partis found in three late Vulgate manuscripts, but it is doubtful whether this versional reading represents an original Greek witness or whether it originated within the Latin tradition.) At the same time, in order to take into account the overwhelming manuscript evidence supporting prw,th, the majority decided to enclose the final sigma of prw,thj within square brackets.

[Despite what have been regarded as insuperable difficulties involved in the commonly received text (prw,th th/j meri,doj), it appears ill-advised to abandon the testimony of î⁷⁴ a A C 81 al, especially since the phrase can be taken to mean merely that Philippi was “a leading city of the district of Macedonia”; cf. Bauer’s Griechisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch, 6te Aufl. (1988), s.v. meri,j. K.A. and B.M.M.]

³¹⁶ See Moulton and Milligan, Vocabulary, s.v., and p. xvi.

³¹⁷ See G. Zuntz, “Textual Criticism of Some Passages of the Acts of the Apostles,” Classica et Mediaevalia, III (1940), pp. 36 f. A. C. Clark argues that kefalh, can have the meaning “extremity,” “apex,” or “frontiertown”; see The Acts of the Apostles (Oxford, 1933), pp. 363 ff.

³¹⁸ See C. H. Turner, “Philippi,” in Hastings’s Dictionary of the Bible, vol. III, p. 838, col. a.