A Textual Commentary On The Greek NT

Acts 9:4-5

The clause sklhro,n soi pro.j ke,ntra lakti,zein is included after diw,keij (ver. Acts 9:4) in E 431 vg^mss syr^{p, h with *} Petilianus Jerome Augustine; and after diw,keij (ver. Acts 9:5) in it^{gig, h, p} vg^ms Lucifer Ambrose. Although Clark argued that it would have been “inartistic” of Luke not to include the clause in one or the other verses (Clark prefers ver. Acts 9:4), ¹⁸⁰ it is more probable that the words were introduced by copyists who assimilated the passage to the account of Paul’s conversion given in Acts 26:14, where the clause follows diw,keij (the text is firm). In support of this judgment is the lack of any reason that would satisfactorily account for the omission of the clause from verses Acts 9:4 or Acts 9:5, had it stood there originally. Likewise, it is always suspicious when a variant reading, which agrees with a parallel passage, has no fixed location but vacillates between two points of attachment in Western witnesses.

¹⁸⁰ Clark expresses himself as follows: “I find it difficult to believe that the writer of Acts would reserve this picturesque detail for the third occasion on which the story is told. Could he have been, to say the least, so inartistic? We should have expected the three accounts to agree, or, failing this, that, if a striking detail was dropped, it would be in Acts 22:7 or Acts 26:14” (The Acts of the Apostles, p. 345). Luke evidently thought otherwise, for the second account of Paul’s conversion is longer than the first, and the third account is longer than the second; for a convenient arrangement of the Greek text of the three accounts in parallel columns, see Erwin Preuschen’s commentary in the series Handbuch zum Neuen Testament (Tübingen, 1912).

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A Textual Commentary On The Greek NT

Acts 9:4-5

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