Acts 9:7 and 22:9 – Did They Hear the Voice or Not?
Listening to debates can be quite entertaining. Every once in a while you hear a good argument, learn something new, find out what different authors or scholars allegedly think, and even enjoy a nice come-back to a rebuttal or a timely joke at the expense of the opposition. But sometimes listening to debates may create more work for you because it is hard to believe everything you hear—are the debaters putting forth their best arguments or just trying to get the upper hand?—and a topic may arise that you just have to roll up your sleeves and check the facts out for yourself. In this post, within the context of a debate between Dan Barker and Mike Licona on the resurrection of Jesus1, I will look at a particularly interesting syntactical phenomenon in Greek where ακόυω (hear) takes different cases for its object, and the role it may play in two different accounts of Paul’s conversion in Acts.
Referring to Paul’s Damascus experience when he saw Jesus, Barker asks Licona what kind of body Jesus had. After answering that he believed Jesus had a changed body, Licona asks Barker if “he grants him Acts”; that is, does Barker admit that Paul had such an encounter with the resurrected Jesus as narrated in Acts? That’s when both go off on a tangent, and it is this tangent I want to talk about (which starts at about 1:03:46 into the debate). Barker does not grant Acts as a reliable account because he says that Luke’s telling of Paul’s conversion is contradictory. In Acts 9:7, it says that the men who were with Paul heard the voice, and in 22:9 it says that the men did not hear the voice.
Licona does not think this is a contradiction, and it is interesting that at this point he asks Barker—who said that he had checked the contradiction in the original Greek—how much Greek Barker had studied. Barker says he had two years of college Greek, and Licona in turn says that he took five years of Greek and has been studying it for 20 years. I wanted to highlight this “authority check” by Licona because that becomes an important issue when discussing who is right when people holding two opposing views read the same Greek text (or any other ancient text for that matter) and come to different conclusions. Who is to believe whom, especially when the audience most likely knows no Greek? Licona says that ακόυω can mean ‘hear’ or ‘understand’ and that most translations rightly translate ακόυω in 9:7 as ‘hear’ and in 22:7 as ‘understand’; the people in the first century, he claims, would not have any problems understanding the distinction. Then he says that Daniel Wallace points out that “given the field of use of ακόυω and φωνη, the fact that in chapter 9 is ακόυω plus the genitive and chapter 22 is ακόυω plus the accusative… certainly harmonizes.” When Barker disagrees, Licona says, “so you are saying that you with two years Greek experience, you are right, and Daniel Wallace, who is a very prominent, respected Greek grammarian, is wrong?”
What Licona is saying is that because ακόυω takes φωνη as a genitive in 9:7, it should be translated as ‘hear’ and that φωνη, as an accusative in 22:9, should be translated as ‘understand.’ And, what is more important, a prominent, respected Greek grammarian backs this up.
Here are the verses:
οἱ δὲ σὺν ἐμοὶ ὄντες τὸ μὲν φῶς ἐθεάσαντο τὴν δὲ φωνὴν οὐκ ἤκουσαν τοῦ λαλοῦντός μοι. (Acts 22:9)
So, let’s see what Wallace has to say about these two verses. It is true that Licona’s contention is presented in Greek Beyond the Basics, but Wallace is actually quoting a grammar by Robertson which is says that
“. . . it is perfectly proper to appeal to the distinction in the cases in the apparent contradiction between ἀκούοντες μὲν τῆς φωνῆς (Ac. 9:7) and τὴν δὲ φωνὴν οὐκ ἤκουσαν (22:9). The accusative case (case of extent) accents the intellectual apprehension of the sound, while the genitive (specifying case) calls attention to the sound of the voice without accenting the sense. The word ακόυω itself has two senses which fall in well with this case-distinction, one ‘to hear,’ the other ‘to understand’” (Wallace 1996: 133).
He points out that the NIV seems to follow this line of reasoning. In the NIV Application commentary on Acts, the author says, almost in passing, that the men in Acts 22:9 just did not understand the voice, so the reader would not even be made aware of the issue (is this typical of most Evangelical commentaries on this passage?). Ben Witherington also seems to favor this and says that here may be another instance of Luke’s “tendency to archaize or follow older style” (in this case by employing classical Greek) so that they heard the voice in Acts 9 communicating to Saul, but in Acts 22 they could not make out the words as to understand what the voice was saying (Witherington 1998: 312-3). (One has to wonder if this would be most natural reading of Acts 22:9 if it weren’t for Acts 9:7.)
However, Wallace goes on to argue that this is dubious:
“On the other hand, it is doubtful that this is where the difference lay between the two cases used with ακόυω in Hellenistic Greek: the NT (including the more literary writers) is filled with examples of ακόυω + genitive indicating understanding (Matt 2:9; John 5:25; 18:37; Acts 3:23; 11:7; Rev 3:20; 6:3, 5;166 8:13; 11:12; 14:13; 16:1, 5, 7; 21:3) as well as instances of ακόυω + accusative where little or no comprehension takes place (explicitly so in Matt 13:19; Mark 13:7/Matt 24:6/Luke 21:9; Acts 5:24; 1 Cor 11:18; Eph 3:2; Col 1:4; Phlm 5; Jas 5:11; Rev 14:2). The exceptions, in fact, are seemingly more numerous than the rule!
Thus, regardless of how one works through the accounts of Paul’s conversion, an appeal to different cases probably ought not form any part of the solution” (Wallace: 133-4).
According to Wallace, making a distinction in the translation of ακόυω solely on the difference of the cases is not well founded. Of course, that does seem to imply that, according to Wallace, there is a contradiction between the two accounts, and that’s why Wallace provides a footnote in which he says that the traditions that Luke gathered were probably from different sources and that he compiled them in a “conservative manner.” Luke is therefore showing evidence of “reticence to drastically alter the traditions as handed down to him.” From this, he concludes that it is still reasonable to take these passages as not contradictory. Is Wallace saying that Luke himself is not contradictory although the traditions that he uses are? If this is correct, it is an interesting distinction, but I am not sure it is all that helpful.
I wonder if this would change Licona’s mind about how he thinks ακόυω should be translated in these two verses. After all, would he dare to say that he is right with only his five years of Greek experience, and Daniel Wallace, who is a very prominent, respected Greek grammarian, is wrong? (I hope you can see the irony.)
It seems to me that, if Wallace is correct, there is no grammatical reason to translate Acts 22:9 as ‘understand.’ Keeping the translation of ακόυω in both verses with the same equivalent English lexeme gives the (careful) reader an opportunity to struggle with what is being said. If the reader then decides, on theological grounds or otherwise, that it should have the sense of ‘understand,’ fine. But when translations like the NIV and ESV make that decision for the reader, the process of coming to grips with the text “as it is” is taken away2. So in my view, the translation by the NRSV is to be preferred:
Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me.
(Acts 22:9)
Now I turn it over to the Greek experts out there. Here is the question:
Do you agree with Wallace that ακόυω taking a genetive or an accusative object is not a determining factor in how it should be translated? Or, to put it in another way, are translations like the NIV and ESV justified in making such a clear distinction?
References
Daniel B Wallace, Greek Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Sybtax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan 1996); Ben Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles: a Socio-rhetorical Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1998).
