The Formal Education of the Author of Luke-Acts by Steve Reece;

Author:Steve Reece; [Reece, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780567705914
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2022-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

“Aesopification” of the Christian Corpus

Therefore, we should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that the expression in question did once exist, quite apart from the Gospel of Luke, embedded in a prose or poetic version of an ancient Aesopic fable, or perhaps in a popular Classical or Hellenistic proverb or aphorism, and that it happened to survive only in these two late dodecasyllabic versions of the Aesopic tales. The extant Aesopic corpus is massive, but what has been lost would surely dwarf what has survived. Expressions in later versions of the fables, like the one under consideration here, that do not happen to have parallels in the ancient Aesopic corpus, need not be regarded as innovations—or as interpolations from extra-Aesopic sources. These late versions may simply have been drawing from versions of fables that survived to their time but have not survived to ours.

Consequently, we should give serious consideration to the possibility that the direction of influence that we have assumed up to this point should be reversed. The author(s) of the dodecasyllabic fables did not draw the expression Ὦ ἀνόητε/ἀνόητοι καὶ βραδὺς/βραδὺ/βραδεῖς τῇ καρδίᾳ “Oh foolish one(s), and slow in heart” from the Gospel of Luke. Rather, the Gospel of Luke drew this expression from an ancient, i.e., pre-Christian, version of these Aesopic fables.

There are several features of the expression that recommend this direction of influence. The expression as a whole occurs nowhere else in Jewish or Christian literature, so it is not particularly at home there. The use of Ὦ “Oh” with the vocative is rare in the New Testament, as in Koine Greek generally, in contrast to its regular usage in Classical Greek. It occurs in only three different passages in the gospels: Jesus addresses the Canaanite woman Ὦ γύναι “Oh woman” (Mt. 15:28); Jesus addresses the crowd Ὦ γενεὰ ἄπιστος “Oh faithless generation” (Mk 9:19—from which the expression is drawn verbatim in Lk. 9:41 and Mt. 17:17); and Jesus addresses his two disciples in the passage under consideration here. The first half of the expression, Ὦ ἀνόητε / Ὦ ἀνόητοι, with “Oh” + “fool(s)” in the vocative, is very rare in Jewish or Christian literature: never in the Septuagint, only once in Philo (Somn. 2.181), and only once elsewhere in the New Testament, when Paul addresses the Galatians thus Ὦ ἀνόητοι Γαλάται “Oh foolish Galatians” (Gal. 3:1). On the other hand, this word combination is fairly common in Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature: Sophocles, Aristophanes (three times—contracted ὦνόητε / ὦνόητοι), Plutarch (twice), Maximus the Sophist (twice), Chariton, Philostratus, Alciphron, etc. The second half of the expression, βραδεῖς τῇ καρδίᾳ “slow in heart,” occurs nowhere else in Jewish or Christian literature. In fact, in the entire Septuagint and New Testament the adjective βραδύς occurs only here and in James 1:19, in an equally aphoristic expression, again with Classical rather than Septuagintal or New Testament resonance: ἔστω δὲ πᾶς ἄνθρωπος ταχὺς εἰς τὸ ἀκοῦσαι, βραδὺς εἰς τὸ λαλῆσαι, βραδὺς εἰς ὀργήν· “Let every man be swift to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.

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