You Will Do Well

But How, Exactly? A Curious Ending to the Apostolic Letter of Acts 15

Bibliographic Data

ID3258562
AuthorsJohn R L Moxon (0000-0002-8210-8466, University of Roehampton, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume15
Issue8
Pages947
Publication date2024-08-06
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel15080947
OpenAlexW4401364774
LanguageEN
References cited113

In this paper, I focus on the puzzling ending of the apostolic letter in Acts 15 in which the addressees are told that if they hold to four "essential" prohibitions, they will "do well" (εὖ πράξετε, v. 29). The question as to how, exactly, can destabilise some understandings of the decree, with alternative translations creating different problems, and particularly so where theological commitments are at play. Following Danker's call for greater attention to this phrase, I undertake a fresh, stratified survey of Greek usage across corpora ranging from the arguably less to the more proximate and bring this into dialogue with the senses given in various literary and social approaches to the decree involving epistolary rhetoric, reciprocity theory, and intertextuality. This reveals how purely linguistic data can stand in tension with compositional arguments in different ways and require a more complex arbitration between possibility, likelihood and coherence when both lexical- and discourse-level constraints are applied. Whilst not solving the problem of the decree outright, observing the impacts of different readings of εὖ πράξετε on the delicate balances involved presses some oblique but productive questions into the interpretive task

Ambivalence · Decree · Digression · Epistemology · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Political science · Rhetoric · Social science · Sociology · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Law · Mathematics · Media, Religion, Digital Communication · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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