Here a little, there a little

When smart guys get it wrong:

“The verb Agabus used (paradidōmi, ‘to deliver, hand over’) requires the sense of voluntary, consciously, deliberately giving over or handing over something or someone else. That is the sense it has in all 119 other instances of the word in the New Testament. But that sense is not true with respect to the treatment of Paul by the Jews: they did not voluntarily hand Paul over to the Romans!” Wayne Arden Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994, p. 1052

In context, Grudem is saying that Agabus got the prophecy wrong; the Jews did not hand Paul over. Wayne Grudem is doubtless a top-notch scholar in an academic sense. He holds a BA from Harvard University, an MDiv from Westminster Theological Seminary, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. He is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Theology & Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary. He was a member of the Translation Oversight Committee for the English Standard Version of the Bible. The above error seems way beneath his pay-grade and way above mine. Yet he seems to have made a simple mistake in his thinking.

While researching and being diligently studious regarding the meaning of Acts 21:4, I ran across Grudem’s continuationist viewpoint on spiritual gifts, particularly that a New Testament prophet might have divine authority in general content while getting details wrong. He presents Agabus (Acts 21:11) as a prime example of this. He believes Agabus’s prophecy was wrong in the detail of παραδωσουσιν (paradidōmi) εις χειρας εθνων (being delivered into the hands of the Gentiles). However, it appears that when he brought forward the 119 uses in the New Testament as proof of the meaning of the Greek word, he missed the fact that there is one verse that is too much for him to prove his case! Acts 28:17. When Paul told the Jews in Rome what happened in Jerusalem, he said that he was to be παρεδοθην (paradidōmi) εις τας χειρας των ρωμαιων (delivered into the hands of the Romans) – the same word that Grudem says means voluntary, consciously, deliberately handing over. Now take what Grudem says the word means and apply it to what Paul said in Acts 28:17. Paul himself said that he was voluntarily deliberately handed over to the Romans! You can’t have it both ways. If Agabus was wrong about what happened in his telling of the future, Paul was wrong about what happened in his recounting of the past!