I just received word that a paper I proposed for the 2007 NW Regional ETS Meeting has been accepted for presentation. The meeting is on Feb. 24 at Corban College in Salem, Oregon.

The genesis of this paper has to do with Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. I was reading the chapter that discusses the "plural to singular narrative device" in Mark and was intrigued. Here Bauckham was positing a syntactic structure that could, in certain cases, point back to eyewitness testimony. It got me thinking, and I wondered if the structure occurred outside of Mark. Bauckham allows for that; he himself cites two Lukan instances. I've been playing around with Logos Bible Software's syntax searching to locate other possible instances and work through them. The paper has to do with one of those instances. Here are the details:

From the Mouth of Paul: Acts 18.19-21 as Eyewitness Testimony

Paul's initial journey to Ephesus, mentioned in Acts 18.19-21, has been dismissed in some critical commentaries (e.g. Conzelmann's Hermeneia volume) as a Lucan insertion with no historical basis. Other critical commentaries (e.g. C.K. Barrett's ICC volume) simply dismiss Conzelmann's suggestion without fully refuting it.

A recent book by Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Eerdmans 2006) describes Marcan usage of something he calls the "plural to singular narrative device" (Bauckham 156-157). He defines the device using syntactic terminology: "a plural verb ... without an explicit subject is used to describe the movements of Jesus and his disciples, followed immediately by a singular verb or pronoun referring to Jesus alone" (Bauckham 156-157). Using this device, Bauckham posits Mark's usage of Peter's eyewitness testimony as underlying source for 21 different movements of Jesus (e.g. Mk 1.21).

The structure and context of Acts 18.19 fit within Bauckham's syntactic description. This exploratory paper proposes that Acts 18.19-21 be seen as an instance of the plural-to-singular narrative device, pointing to eyewitness testimony from Paul as basis of the short episode. If this analysis holds, this paper provides substance by which to dismiss the suggestion that the text is a Lucan insertion with no historical basis.

Thus, the paper will be a review of the primary commentaries on the passage; a review of Bauckham's (and, necessarily, C.H. Turner's) description of the device and how it is used, a discussion of using syntax searching to match Bauckham's criteria, and a discussion of how Acts 18.19-21 fit Bauckham's criteria. There are some rough spots, notably that of why Luke would use the device in this portion of Acts when he tends to remove it from shared Marcan material in his gospel.

We'll see what happens.