Acts 4:25

Acts 4:25 o` tou/ patro.j h`mw/n dia. pneu,matoj a`gi,ou sto,matoj Daui.d paido,j sou eivpw,n {C}

The text of this verse is in a very confused state. The reading of the old uncials is anomalous both grammatically (how is the phrase tou/ patro.j h`mw/n to be construed?) and theologically (where else does God speak through the Holy Spirit?). Many attempts have been made to account for the confusion in the manuscripts. On his theory of a written Aramaic source Torrey reconstructed the text as follows: rma %bd[ dywd aXdwq yd axwr ~Wpl anwba yd ayh which means, “That which our father, thy servant David, said by (or, by the command of) the Holy Spirit.” According to Torrey, this clear statement became chaotic when “the y of ayh was lengthened into w (perhaps the most common of all accidents in Hebrew-Aramaic manuscripts, and here made especially easy by the preceding context) [and] the whole passage was ruined. anwba yd awh was of necessity o` tou/ patro.j h`mw/n, and every other part of our Greek text followed inevitably; there is no other way in which a faithful translator would have been likely to render it.” ¹²¹

Objections to this superficially attractive proposal can be made on psychological and grammatical grounds. According to Lake and Cadbury, “It is hard to believe that a writer of Luke’s general ability would have produced what Torrey rightly calls ‘an incoherent jumble of words,’ and…ayh rma (for ‘said it’) is regarded as harsh by some authorities on Aramaic idiom.” ¹²²

According to an interesting theory first proposed by H. W. Moule,

“the words as we have them contain traces of three or more alternative ways of writing the sentence, any one of which could introduce the quotation i[na ti, k)t)l) Thus:

1. o` dia. pneu,matoj a`gi,ou eivpw,n
2. o` dia. sto,matoj Dauei.d @tou/# paido,j sou eivpw,n
3. o` dia. sto,matoj tou/ patro.j h`mw/n Dauei.d eivpw,n.

[Luke] knew his own marks for deletion or addition, but one of the earliest copyists misunderstood them, combined words which were really alternative, and thereby sowed the seed of confusion for all time. Some such theory as this is perhaps both simpler and less unlikely than those generally put forward.” ¹²³

However the variant readings arose, it is widely agreed that (a) the more complicated readings could scarcely have arisen through additions to the simpler text of 049 056 0142 and most minuscules, followed by the Textus Receptus (for no adequate reason can be assigned why it should have been glossed so ineptly), and (b) the earliest attainable text appears to be that attested by î⁷⁴ a A B E 33 al. What the author wrote originally and what kind of textual corruption was responsible for the multiplication of variant readings are questions that have been answered variously. Lachmann ¹²⁴ traced all the trouble to the addition of the word pneu,matoj (though surely a`gi,ou is involved too, for to leave it in the text, as Lachmann does, results in the utterly unlikely expression dia. a`gi,ou sto,matoj Dauei,d). Westcott and Hort, who marked the passage with an obelus indicating the presence of a primitive error, made two different suggestions concerning the origin of the error. ¹²⁵ According to Westcott, “a confusion of lines ending successively with dia d=a=d= dia may have brought pneu,matoj a`gi,ou too high up, and caused the loss of one dia,.” According to Hort, “if tou/ patro,j is taken as a corruption of toi/j patra,sin, the order of words in [the W-H] text presents no difficulty, David (or the mouth of David) being represented as the mouth of the Holy Spirit.”

Recognizing that the reading of î⁷⁴ a A B E al is unsatisfactory, the Committee nevertheless considered it to be closer to what the author wrote originally than any of the other extant forms of text.

¹²¹ C. C. Torrey, The Composition and Date of Acts, pp. 17 f.

¹²² The Beginnings of Christianity, vol. IV, pp. 46 f.

¹²³ Expository Times, LI (1939—40), p. 396.

¹²⁴ See pp. vii f. of the Preface to vol. II of his second edition (Berlin, 1850).

¹²⁵ “Notes on Select Readings,” p. 92.