Acts 4:24

Acts 4:24 avkou,santej

After avkou,santej D and cop^G67 add kai. evpigno,ntej th.n tou/ qeou/ evne,rgeian (“And when they heard it, and recognized the working of God …”), a clause which Harris was at first inclined to explain as a Montanist gloss, ¹¹⁹ but which he subsequently described as “either a part of the primitive Greek text of the Acts or an extremely early Greek expansion, with a strong balance of probability in favour of the former.” ¹²⁰ The use of evne,rgeia here, as Blass had earlier observed, is in accord with the account of the interposition of divine providence in 3 Macc 4.21, with which Harris compares a similar usage in 3 Macc 5.12, 28 and 2 Macc 3.29. Against Harris’s strong preference for regarding the clause as original is the fact Luke nowhere else uses evne,rgeia (in the New Testament the word appears only in Paul).

¹¹⁹ J. Rendel Harris, Codex Bezae, p. 152.

¹²⁰ “Two Important Glosses in the Codex Bezae,” Expositor, Sixth Series, II (1900), p. 399.