The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

GERBERN S. OEGEMA 385
2. THE “RIGHTEOUS ONE” IN ACTS 7:52 AND 1 ENOCH 89:52
The Greek text of Acts 7:52 reads: ti/na tw= n profhtw= n ou0k e)di/wcan
oi( pate/rej u(mw= n; kai\ a)pe/kteinan tou\j prokataggei/lantaj peri\
th=j e)leu/sewj tou= dikai/ou, ou[ nu=n u(mei=j prodo/tai kai\ fonei=j
e)ge/nesqe “Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They
killed those who foretold the Coming of the Righteous One, and now you have
become his betrayers and murderers” (NRSV, emphasis added).
The problem with the expression h( e0leu/sij tou= dikai/ou is that h(
e1leusij is a hapax legomenon in the New Testament and that o( di/kaioj
occurs more often (as in Acts 22:14, for Jesus). Therefore, the whole
expression as a combination of the two parts appears nowhere else in the
New Testament. 11 If we, therefore, want to look for parallels, we have to
look, first of all, for all possible ancient Jewish and Christian parallels of
the whole expression h( e0leu/sij tou= dikai/ou outside of the New
Testament.
According to Matthew Black, the whole verse of Acts 7:52 is an example
of one of the many cases of asyndeton in the Gospels and Acts, the
lack of a connecting particle between sentences being far more characteristic
of Aramaic than of Greek. For this reason, it is mostly found in
the sayings and parables of Jesus, as well as here in the speech of
Stephen. 12 In Aramaic, the phrase “the Coming of the Righteous One”
may have been qydch t)yb (and in Syriac, )qydzd htyt)m,
although the Aramaic word for “(the) righteous (one)” is +y#q / h+#q
(Ethiopic: s¸adqa). Therefore, we also have to look for parallels to the
Aramaic phrase. 13
Let us first begin by examining 1 En. 89:52. The Ethiopic version of
89:52 reads in an English translation: “However, one of them was not
killed but escaped alive and fled away; he cried aloud to the sheep, and
they wanted to kill him, but the Lord of the sheep rescued him from the
sheep and caused him to ascend to me and settle down.” 14
The “one of them” is Elijah; the “Lord of the sheep” is God; and the
“I,” to whom the “one of them” ascends, is Enoch. That “one of them”
11. See BAGD, 195–96.
12. Matthew Black, An Aramaic Approach to the Gospels and Acts (3d ed.; with an appendix
on the Son of Man by Geza Vermes; Oxford: Clarendon, 1967; repr. 1979),
55–61.
13. See the Aramaic-Greek-Ethiopic Glossary in Jozef T. Milik, The Books of Enoch:
Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 392 and 402.
14. Translation according to Ephraim Isaac, “1 (Ethiopic Apocalypse of) Enoch,”
in OTP 1:5–89.