The Provenance of the Interpolator in the ‘Western’ Text of Acts and of Acts Itself

Abstract

First of all, the title of this paper needs justification. Why should we assume that anyone ever made interpolations in the text of Acts? Ropes, who is still the most considerable authority on this subject, spoke of the ‘Western’ text all through his work on the Text of Acts in The Beginnings of Christianity as if it gave evidence of the work of a reviser of the text, not of an interpolator, and many scholars before him had the same opinion. On the other hand, very recent scholarship has tended to the opposite view, that it is wrong to hold that ‘Western’ readings in the New Testament necessarily represent a single continuous revision done at one particular moment in the history of the text. Professor G. D. Kilpatrick, for instance, in a recent article suggests that every reading in Acts has to be considered on its merits, independently of speculation about whether it represents a revision or a recension or a ‘good’ MS tradition. He believes that the ‘Western’ readings often do not represent a revision or recension, but are single examples of original, correct readings preserved in this particular MS tradition. In his view, word order, orthography, and grammatical, syntactical and philological considerations applied de novo to each reading should be paramount in attempting to discover correct readings. The wisdom of this approach has been confirmed by the careful scholarship applied to the subject by M. Wilcox in his book The Semitisms of Acts (1965).