SaintCog

This is probably not the most provocative topic in the world, but I think it's still interesting, and sort of odd.

In his Gospel, Luke uses the particle "te" a total of 9 times. In Acts, "te" is used about 150 times. One would think that how an author uses such a term would be somewhat consistent throughout his writing, as it would simply be indicative of his writing style. It seems this would especially be the case in two documents of more or less the same length within the same basic narrative genre. Perhaps the fact that he was heavily dependent on written sources in the gospel might have something to do with it. But his significant grammatical and stylistic deviation from Mark's rusty Greek shows that he had no qualms with rewording his sources to fit his own stylistic preferences.

Can anyone offer an explanation to account for this bizarre stylistic inconsistency?

Cheers,
SC

Peter Kirby

No explanation from me right now, but this is just one element (of hundreds or thousands) that would factor into a stylometric test.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

neilgodfrey

No answers, only more questions and tentative proposals:

Could the different usage have anything to do with the gospel being pretty much a ready-made story that the author only had to polish, edit, augment a little, etc. while Acts required a bit more independent and creative effort thus exposing more of the original style of the author?

Would it be worth checking if there is a correlation between the certain usages of the te particle and certain types of pericopes in Acts -- e.g. pericopes that appear to be repeating the same basic thematic/topoi formats, those that appear to be re-writing stories from the gospels, LXX, etc. Acts is repetitive (e.g. his persecution anecdotes show minimal if any structural variation; Paul's miracles are recycled from both Peter's and the gospel's; etc.) and the author is at his creative best in the way he disguises the repetitiveness of his story units by varying the colour, length, details of the anecdotes.

Is the difference a bit like someone finding himself using lots more "ands" and "ums" when winging a story compared with a far more showy presentation when he was able to repeat with slight modifications a pre-existing well-know story?

I googled the words [luke particle te gospel acts] and found several interesting academic discussions closely related to your question so you might find some more starters doing that search too.

N

spin

Another quick one, the particle men, Lk: 10, Acts: 51.


spin

Ben C Smith

Interesting stat. I notice that Matthew and John have τε only thrice each, and Mark lacks it entirely. It does not seem to be a very evangelistic particle.

It seems to me that τε would either lead to or result from a more complex sentence structure, and my impression is that all of the gospels use a rather simple syntax, while Acts is more refined.

Ben.

neilgodfrey

An interesting control might be to see if we see any similar differences between, say, Books 1, 2 and 9 of Herodotus' Histories. Each of those by the one author present very different types of data/histories based possibly on quite different sources.

Till then, what were the basic reasons for arguing against a common authorship of Luke and Acts again?

N

spin

Well, let's start off at the beginning, knowing that all the synoptic gospels have been worked over and are not the totally the work of any one writer, beside the "dedication" to Theophilus (and did Marcion's gospel have that? -- Tertullian doesn't seem to think so), what would ever make you think that they were by the same author??


spin