DIAGNÓSTICO Fase previa
7. RESULTADOS En este apartado se exponen los datos extraídos de las entrevistas
It must be granted that our refined translation of Acts 28:29 has done little to diminish its perceived banality. Yet as I intend to show next, the noun συζήτησις has a second meaning that gives the verse’s seemingly bland statement a much more ominous cast. The rare noun συν-
ζήτησις, like several other prefixed verbs and nouns in the New Testament, shares the basic
semantic scope of ζήτησις.53 Presumably Luke and his contemporaries sensed a slight difference
in meaning between these words, yet such distinctions are no longer accessible to us.
Interestingly, ζήτησις and its prefixed compounds have a secondary but not uncommon meaning that appears in judicial contexts, namely “inquiry/investigation”. A non-exhaustive search in the
(33.440) is listed as “dispute” (along with its cognates ζήτημα, ζήτησις and ἐκζήτησις). The verb occurs eleven times in the New Testament (in Mark, Luke and Acts). Mark uses it in six instances. The strong meaning “to debate against (a religious rival)” appears in Mark 8:11, 9:14, 9:16 and 12:28 whereas the neutral meaning “to discuss (among your peers) the meaning of an event” is intended in Mark 1:27 and Mark 9:10. Out of the six verses in Mark that contain συζητέω, only Mark 1:27 is preserved in Luke’s gospel, in Luke 4:36 which uses συλλαλέω instead of συζητέω when the Jews confer with each other after Jesus’ exorcism of the Capernaum demoniac. As discussed above, the other two instances of συζητέω in Acts 6:9 and Acts 9:29 reveal purposeful repetition of the word to open and close a narrative scene.
53 The fondness of ancient Greeks to form (by the addition of prefixes) new verbs (ζητέω → συζητέω) or nouns
(ζήτησις → συζήτησις) often puzzles speakers of modern languages. For instance, in Luke-Acts, the verbs δέχομαι,
ἀναδέχομαι, ἀποδέχομαι, παραδέχομαι, and ὑποδέχομαι all mean “welcome someone to one’s house”; what is more, other New Testament writers also use ἐπιδέχομαι, εἰσδέχομαι and προσδέχομαι with the same meaning. See discussion in Parsons, Culy and Stigall 2010:369 and in section 34.53 of Nida and Louw 1999. Just like the verb δέχομαι and its prefix-formed derivatives, the verb ζητέω and its cognates ἐκζητέω, ἀναζητέω, ἐπιζητέω and συζητέω also participate in this linguistic phenomenon, forming a cluster of words that share a core meaning with minor nuances.
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extant literature reveals numerous instances of this judicial usage, several of them in Christian- related writings of the period 100-300 CE.54
I will focus here only on the most relevant examples. (1) The word ζήτησις as “legal inquiry”, when found in combination with πολλὴ, is translated by English-speaking scholars as “strict inquiry”. For instance, D.H. Ant. Rom. 8.89.4 reads ζήτησις πολλὴ ἐγίνετο: “A strict inquiry took place” (after it was found that a Vestal Virgin had lost her virginity). Likewise in Plut. Dem. 25.6, one reads πολλὴν ἐποιήσαντο τοῦ πράγματος ζήτησιν: “[The Athenians, furious at Demosthenes] conducted a strict inquiry about the bribery.” 55 Thus, the πολλὴ συζήτησις of
Acts 28:29, if read independently, could mean not only “much discussion” but also “a strict legal inquiry”. (2) Within Acts itself, Governor Festus, when talking to King Agrippa, refers to the legal investigation of the Jewish charges against Paul as ζήτησις. Indeed, Acts 25:20 reads “I was at a loss how to investigate (ἀπορούμενος δὲ ἐγὼ τὴν περὶ τούτων ζήτησιν) such matters; so I asked if he would be willing to go to Jerusalem and stand trial there on these charges”.56 (3) The
noun συζήτησις was used in the sense of legal inquiry in the ending of the Life of Aesop, a very popular biography, probably written around the time when Acts was composed. At the end of this narrative, Aesop verbally offends the Delphians when he visits their city; hence, the infuriated authorities of Delphi fabricate charges against Aesop, accuse and try him. Although
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See (a) in the classical period (Dinarchus 1, 1.8, 1.10 and 1.55); (b) among historians of the Koine period (D.H. Ant. Rom. 8.89.4) and among Luke’s contemporaries (Plut. Dem. 25.6 and Jos. AJ 14.195, 17.62.1 and BJ. 7.60.2); (c) in popular literature of the 1st and 2nd century CE (Charit. 4.2.8 and Vita Aes. W. 142.8); (d) in fragments of
papyri that deal with trials such as POxy.237 vi7 (ca. 89 CE), POxy.97.1 (ca. 115-116 CE) and P. Fayum 217 (late 2nd century); (e) among Christian authors (Athenagoras Leg. 2.1-5, ca. 175; 2nd century documents preserved ap.
Eus. HE.4.8.8-9.3 and HE. 5.1.14); (f) and within Luke Acts itself (Luke 10:50-51, Acts 18:15 and particularly Acts 25:20).
55 See Earnest Cary’s translation of D.H. Ant. Rom. 8.89.4 in the 1945 Loeb edition of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the translation of Plut. Dem. 25.6 in John Dryden’s 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives.
56 Notice also the use of ἐκζητέω in Luke 11:50-51, which in Louw and Nida 1999 (Section 56.C: Courts and Legal
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Aesop is clearly innocent, he is sentenced to die by being thrown from a cliff. In the very last sentence of the book we are told that leading men from Greece came to Delphi to “conduct an investigation” (συζήτησιν ποιησάμενοι) and to punish Aesop’s murderers.57
It is worth noticing that Life of Aesop offers perhaps the closest linguistic resemblance to the Greek of the New Testament, and it has been proposed that the traditional story of Aesop’s life might have influenced the Gospel writers.58 Notice also that the punishment of Aesop (being
thrown off a cliff) is reminiscent of what the Jews of Nazareth intend to do with Jesus in Luke 4:30 after his first missionary speech.59 We shall never know if the insertion of the rare
συζήτησις at the end of Western Acts was influenced by the ending in the Life of Aesop. Yet we can certainly tell that Luke-Acts was inspired by its contemporary literary environment. As we shall see in § 3.7, phrases in Paul’s trial scenes of Acts and the recurrent portrayal of Jews as the
conniving legal enemies of the apostle have points in contact with the pagan Acta
Alexandrinorum. These examples serve as another indication that the author (and reviser) of Acts were familiar with common motifs of the non-Christian literature of their period. By the same token, we may presume that popular traditions about the death of Aesop, the unjustly killed
57The idiomatic expression ποιοῦμαι + συζήτησιν (“to conduct an inquiry”) used in Life of Aesop is also found with
slight variations in Plutarch (ποιοῦμαι + ζήτησιν, Dem. 25.6) and Josephus(ποιοῦμαι + ἀναζήτησιν, BJ. 7.60.2). Aesop’s biography is extant in two early recensions, Vita G and Vita W; my quote comes from the latter. The date of their composition is not known with accuracy but researchers fit it within the period of New Testament writers (1st century BCE to 2nd century CE). In harmony with the extant textual tradition, POxy. XV 1800, a fragmentary
papyrus of the late 2nd century CE, briefly addresses the death of Aesop and also states that he was thrown from a
cliff. For a critical edition of the Greek texts see Perry 1952:81-107. For a modern translation of Life of Aesop see Wills 2006:227-237.
58 For a discussion on the importance of Life of Aesop as a “Hero Cult Paradigm” and its relevance to the Gospels
see Wills 1997:23-50 and Wills 2006:222-237. As to linguistic similarities, Pervo 1998:77-120 remarks that Bauer’s Lexicon has 120 references to Life of Aesop, indicating its close linguistic kinship to the New Testament. Ibid. 81, Pervo notices that some MSS of the W recension of Life of Aesop have as a title Διήγεσις τοῦ Αισώπου. Cf. Luke 1.1 in which the author introduces Luke-Acts as a Διήγεσις.
59 This passage is unique to Luke’s gospel and historically suspicious, since the closest cliff to Nazareth is more than
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Greek hero who, just like Paul, was not part of the ruling élite, must have been a known cultural reference to many of Acts’ early readers.60
So far our philological analysis has shown that Acts 28:29 ends with a word that means not only “discussion” but also “legal inquiry”. Almost any word has multiple connotations, and although one may be primary, the force of the others may also be felt. “Last words are lasting words”, and given that the noun συζήτησις is the final word of the storyline of Western Acts, it was very likely meant to activate memories of judicial trouble in its original readership.61 An
investigation of the literature of Luke’s period has revealed that the judicial meaning of
συζήτησις, probably murkier for later generations of Christians, was discernible to the early readers of Acts. The ingenuity of Acts 28:29 as a mark of good storytelling does not end there. Further analysis shows that in fact the whole sentence semantically conveys two meanings, a technique that scholars have found in at least seven other passages of Acts.62 A detailed
60 Cf. the work of Dennis MacDonald on echoes of Homeric epics in the Gospel and Acts. For some examples of
his findings, see MacDonald 2006:372-384. Not all of the examples that McDonald posits are persuasive, and his belief in Mark’s conscious imitation of Hector’s death and burial is too bold. Still, his general insight is no less true. Christian writers in the 1st and 2nd century did not operate in a vacuum, but were very much surrounded by past and
present cultural references of the Greco-Roman world which they inevitably absorbed. What is more, for Jewish and Christian writers, these references offered a didactic point of contact with Gentiles when they wanted to transmit their religious views. For instance, Josephus draws an explicit parallel between Moses’ parting of waters and the one recorded among the exploits of Alexander the Great (AJ 2.347-348).
61 Recall that Paul’s name appears first in Acts at the end of the sentence that describes the stoning of Stephen. In
Acts 7.57-59, Σαύλος (Paul’s Hebrew name) is purposely placed as the final word of the sentence for maximum effect. As to the emotional impact of ζήτησις and its derivatives, it is worth mentioning that sometimes they also carry the sense of “arrest or search of criminals”. For example, see D.H. Ant. Rom. 3.39.4, Jos. AJ 17.10.10 and
POxy. 80.15 (238-244 CE). Among Christian authors this meaning is also observed. According to Eusebius (HE
3.33.2) the Greek translation of Trajan’s famous decree conquirendi nonsunt, prohibiting the active search of Christians, was τὸ Χριστιανῶν φῦλον μὴ ἐκζητεῖσθαι. See also Gospel of Peter 7 (written ca. 150), Mart. Pol. 3 and 6, Mart.Conon 1, Mart. Pionii 3, ActPl 14.2 and Eus. HE 3.12.1 and 3.32.3-4.
62 For a general discussion of stylistic techniques in early Christian writings see Koester 2000:1.109-11. The
ancients would have identified the double meaning of συζήτησις in verse 28:29 as an example of paronomasia. Some examples from Acts discussed in the scholarly literature are 17:30, 21:28 and 24:3 (Conzelmann 1987: xxxvi), Acts 16:17-18 (Klutz 2004:211) and Acts 19:32 (Pervo 2009:495). Moreover, Given 2001:39-82, in his detailed analysis of the famous Areopagus speech of Paul in Acts 17.16-34, has shown that it strings together three
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explanation of how the paronomasia of Acts 28:29 works linguistically is given in Appendix 3.c. I summarize the results here. Although at first sight 28:29 seems an ordinary Luke-Acts
sentence, apart from the choice of the rare noun συζήτησις as the final word, the verse contains other atypical features such as the three-word separation between the adjective πολλὴν and the noun συζήτησιν and the use of the idiomatic expression ἔχω+ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς + noun to convey the actions of the Jews in the sentence. The construction ἔχω+ ἐν ἑαυτοῖς + noun appears five times elsewhere in the New Testament (Mark 4:17 and 9:50, John 5:42 and 6:53 and 2 Cor 1:9). It carries the meaning “to have within themselves”, “to have within their souls”, and by extension “to think about”. Hence, apart from its primary meaning, Acts 28:29 might also be translated as “After Paul said these things, the Jews left thinking about a strict legal inquiry”. In other words, the verse slyly implicates that the leading Jews of Rome somehow acted against Paul in his last and fateful trial.