Acts 3:11

Acts 3:11

The two forms of text of this verse involve a particularly difficult set of problems, some textual, some archaeological. Instead of the usual text, codex Bezae reads evkporeuome,nou de. tou/ Pe,trou kai. VIwa,nou sunexeporeu,eto kratw/n auvtou,j( oi` de. qambhqe,ntej e;sthsan evn th|/ stoa|/( h` kaloume,nh Solomw/noj( e;kqamboi, which may be rendered as follows (the material in square brackets is not in D but is added here from the Alexandrian text in order to make sense of the phraseology of D): “And as Peter and John went out, he went out with them, holding on to them; and [all the people ran together to them and] stood wondering in the portico that is called Solomon’s, astounded.”

The differences between the Alexandrian and Western texts involve the location of Solomon’s portico. According to the Alexandrian text (a) Peter and John healed the lame man at the Beautiful gate; (b) they went into the temple (ver. Acts 3:8); and (c) they became the center of a crowd that ran together to them in Solomon’s portico. From this account the reader would conclude that Solomon’s portico was inside the i`ero,n. On the other hand, according to the Western text the apostles (a) heal the lame man at the Beautiful gate, (b) they go into the temple, and then (c) the apostles and the healed man go out to Solomon’s portico. This envisages the location of Solomon’s portico outside the i`ero,n (see however the Western text and the comment at 5.12).

Commentators try in various ways to resolve the difficulty. Dibelius regards the Western text as an editorial attempt to cover up the seam left by Luke between his own work and the preceding narrative that he incorporated from an older source. ⁹⁶ According to F. F. Bruce, this is another instance where the Western text makes explicit what is implicit in the Alexandrian text, as if the readers could not be trusted to draw the correct inference for themselves. ⁹⁷ On the other hand, after a painstaking analysis of the topographical evidence of the temple area, Kirsopp Lake concludes that the Western text must be accepted as the original. ⁹⁸

It may be conceded that Luke was less well acquainted with the topography of the temple than was the person who was responsible for the tradition embodied in codex Bezae. At the same time, however, even the most ardent proponent of the Western text would scarcely be prepared to accept the wording of the text of D, as it stands, as the work of so careful an author as Luke. For, in addition to the need for identifying the “they” in ver. Acts 3:11 in some such way as is done in the Alexandrian text (enclosed in square brackets in the translation given above), the atrocious grammar of evn th|/ stoa|/( h` kaloume,nh Solomw/noj, reminds one of the solecisms perpetrated by the author of the Apocalypse.

The least unsatisfactory text, therefore, seems to be that preserved in a A B C 81 al. The reading kratou/ntoj de. tou/ ivaqe,ntoj cwlou/ (P S most minuscules, followed by the Textus Receptus), which identifies the colorless auvtou/ of the earlier witnesses, is obviously a secondary development, probably connected with the beginning of an ecclesiastical lection at this point.

⁹⁶ M. Dibelius, “The Text of Acts,” in his Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (New York, 1956), p. 85.

⁹⁷ The Book of Acts, p. 106.

⁹⁸ The Beginnings of Christianity, vol. V, p. 484. On somewhat different grounds Jean Duplacy comes to the same conclusion; see his contribution to Mémorial Gustave Bardy, entitled, “A propos d’une variante ‘occidental’ des Actes des Apôtres (III, 11),” Revue des études augustiniennes, II (1956), pp. 231—242.