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.
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Kirk, J. R. Daniel. Unlocking Romans: Resurrection and the Justification of God. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2008.

Unlocking Romans first came to my attention in a post by Foolish Tarheel Daniel Kirk’s New Book: Unlocking Romans. Although I was not planning to read anything on Romans now (since I had spent some time on it last year), I was impressed by FT’s recommendation of Daniel Kirk as a person and his work. FT thinks that Kirk’s exegesis is “careful and sensitive” and whose sensitivity spans from “historical, cultural, communal, and theological issues of the first century to missional, practical, theological, and pastoral concerns for both then and now.” With this recommendation and the fact that Daniel Kirk would probably interact with the New Perspective on Paul, I decided to read the book. I was not disappointed.

Starting with the question of “Who is God?,” Kirk says that “no question is more central to the study of Paul than to determine at the outset which God we expect to find as the topic of his letters” (2). Can God be defined in universal terms without reference to the story of Israel? His answer is no.

If this is true, then we need to start asking questions about how God will fulfill his promises to Israel and be faithful to His covenant. Therefore the following statement gets to the heart of the thesis of the book:

“In Romans, the resurrection of Jesus becomes Paul’s key for demonstrating that the promises contained in the Scriptures have been fulfilled in the Christ event…Because Paul’s God is the God of particulars, the God whose righteousness is tied to a particular story in which God has promised to act in a particular way and to bless a particular people, Paul must show that his gospel message makes sense as the fulfillment of that God’s actions fulfilling precisely those promises and blessing that particular people” (8).

Basically, Jesus’ resurrection is the hermeneutical key for understanding Romans. In a sense, this book is proposing that Paul’s hermeneutics is a hermeneutics of resurrection.
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