Acts 3:16

Acts 3:16

The text of the first part of ver. Acts 3:16 is exceedingly awkward; literally it runs, “And by faith in his name has his name made this man strong, whom you behold and know.” The proposal of Burkitt ¹⁰⁶ to place a colon before tou/ton, thus taking the preceding words with ver. Acts 3:15, only partly relieves the difficulty, for it is still awkward, as Bruce points out, “to have the genitive ou- and the dative th|/ pi,stei together dependent on ma,rture,j evsmen.” ¹⁰⁷

Torrey argued that the original Aramaic, in an unpointed text, was ambiguous, and that what was “originally intended was not Hmev, @QeT;, evstere,wse to. o;noma auvtou/, but Hmef' @QiT;, u`gih/ evpoi,hsen (or kate,sthsen) auvto,n.” <sup>108</sup> The meaning, therefore, is “and by faith in his name he [either VIhsou/j or o` qeo,j] has made whole this man whom you see and know.” The difficulty with this suggestion, however, as with so many explanations that postulate a misunderstanding of an Aramaic original, is how one can explain psychologically that such a misunderstanding could ever have arisen.

These proposals do not relieve the redundancy that remains when one continues with the second part of ver. Acts 3:16: “and the faith which is through him [Jesus] has given him [the cripple] this perfect health in the presence of you all.” Following a suggestion made by his father, C. F. D. Moule refers to several passages in Acts that seem to preserve alternative drafts of the same sentence. He writes: “If it is conceivable that the writer of the Acts really did leave his work unrevised, and that each of these passages represents several different attempts to say the same thing, which were eventually copied collectively, instead of the alternatives being struck out, it would offer a more plausible explanation of these passages (I suggest) than either the hypothesis of intolerably bad mistranslation, or that of an unaccountable conflation of simpler texts; and it might throw an extremely interesting light on the writer’s style and sensitiveness to alternative possibilities in idiom.” ¹⁰⁹

In the present passage Moule, using Westcott and Hort’s text, suggests that the three drafts of the sentence that were combined were:

(a) th|/ pi,stei tou/ ovno,matoj auvtou/ [ou-toj evsw,qh — or equivalent, this alternative being defective].

(b) tou/ton … evstere,wsen to. o;noma auvtou/.

(c) h` pi,stij h` diV auvtou/ [or tou/ ovno,matoj auvtou/] e;dwken auvtw|/ th.n o`loklhri,an tau,thn…

Interesting though this suggestion is, it leaves the modern editor in a quandry: shall one assume that the last of the three rival drafts best represents the intention of the author, or — since apparently the author could not make up his mind — must one not reproduce the several clauses, redundant though they are? In the latter case, much can be said in favor of punctuating (with Lachmann, followed by Blass) by placing a colon after evstere,wsen (omitting, of course, the comma after to. o;noma auvtou/).

¹⁰⁶ Journal of Theological Studies, XX (1919), pp. 324 f.

¹⁰⁷ The Acts of the Apostles, (1951), p. 110.

¹⁰⁸ The Composition and Date of Acts, p. 16. For objections against Torrey’s proposal, see Max Wilcox, The Semitisms of Acts (Oxford, 1965), pp. 144 ff.

¹⁰⁹ Expository Times, LXV (1954), p. 220.