Qui dixerunt eis sicut præceperat illis Jesus, et dimiserunt eis.
I know this is common for Qui to start a sentence but I don’t have a firm grasp of how to render this or what it’s doing there in the sentence. One can basically leave it out and just state the subject as “they” (in this context the disciples). How would you explain what this qui is doing there?
And at the end, what does eis mean here? Is it abl. “with them”? I’ve seen some translations that would seem to require “eos” and say they sent “them” away.
Grammatically speaking qui is a continuation of the previous sentence in the narrative, but it does effectively begin a new sentence, tantamount to “And they”. It’s a common use of the relative pronoun in Latin, making for greater narrative continuity. The Greek is οἱ δὲ “and they”, more like English.
eis is very odd. I’d have certainly expected eos accusative, corresponding to the Greek (αφῆκαν αυτούς), cf. Nunc dimittis servum tuum.
Would you with “eis” is more likely to be the abl. “with them” or dat (as if somehow this verb takes the dat.) and so just means “them”? Are there other options I’m not considering? I even just checked the new vulgate to see if they had made any changes to that word but it’s the same.
Does this explain it (from a Grammar of the Vulgate)? But I’m not sure this is the kind of verb that it notes here.
116. The Ablative as Object, with Verbs and Adjectives of plenty and want, and with Verbs expressing use (from),
or enjoyment (of), as frui, fungi, potiri, uti, uesci. In these cases the Ablative expresses the matter or thing (with
what?) : so ’ esurientes inpleuit bonis ’ Lk. 1. 53 ; ’ repleti fructibus ’ Phil. 1. 11 ; 'sustentate eum pane tribulationis
1 Kgs. (111 Reg.) 22. 27; culpa uacasset ’ Hebr. 8. 7 ; 'egemus testibus ’ Mt. 26. 65; ‘qui cura indigebant’ Lk.
9. 11 ; 'Dominus his opus habet ’ Mt. 21. 3.1
No that doesn’t come close to explaining it. I suspect scribal error, i.e. that this eis (the second in this sentence) originated as an unthinking copyist’s mistake for eos.
Once in, errors can be hard to get out. But we’d have to compare all versions and witnesses in order to recover the Latin’s textual history. (Jerome had nothing to do with it, as I understand.) et dimiserunt eis is most peculiar Latin. It doesn’t at all correspond to the Greek, and is pretty much meaningless.
It was 1582 and they were still burning witches when they came up with “goe with them”, but I suspect that they were just trying to parallel the Latin.
It’s easiest for me to imagine a Greek source for the original Latin translation that read ἀφῆκαν αὐτοῖς, an easy substitution, and one with a clear meaning: they handed [it] over to them.
Hi all, my first reading is that eis in 11:6 is simply dative of benefit here (with an implied direct object illum or similar).
Cf. illis in Mark 15:15 with the same verb: Pilatus autem, volens populo satisfacere, dimisit illis Barabbam et tradidit Iesum flagellis caesum, ut crucifigeretur.
The implied object in 11:6 Vulgate appears to be the colt referred to in the immediately preceding verses (not the men, unlike the Greek – why it differs, no idea!):
3 Et si quis vobis dixerit: “Quid facitis hoc?”, dicite: “Domino necessarius est, et continuo illum remittit* iterum huc” ”.
4 Et abeuntes invenerunt pullum ligatum ante ianuam foris in bivio et solvunt eum.
5 Et quidam de illic stantibus dicebant illis: “ Quid facitis solventes pullum? ”.
6 Qui dixerunt eis, sicut dixerat Iesus; et dimiserunt eis.
(* Note that the Clementine Vulgate I have actually has dimittet here in 11:3, matching the verb in 11:6. The Nova Vulgata has remittit in 11:3.)
I’m not wedded to this, and it could well be scribal error as there’s an obvious difference between the Greek and Latin, but this was my first reading of the Latin before I checked the Greek and it seems to work.
Exactly. And so “they handed [it] over to them.” Mark 15:15 is a good find. If the Latin translator has dimisit illis Barabbam for ἀπέλυσεν αὐτοῖς τὸν Βαραββᾶν, that seems like additional evidence that here he is reading ἀφῆκαν αὐτοῖς here instead of our text’s ἀφῆκαν αὐτούς.
dimisit illis Barabbam is not a good parallel to our dimiserunt eis, since there verb has a direct object, as one would expect. Compare e.g. Acts 5:40 et dimiserunt eos. That’s surely what the Latin should be here. Whether the dative (or ablative) originates in some otherwise unrepresented Greek exemplar, as Joel hypothesizes, or in the Latin itself, as I would suppose, there’s really no telling.