The Variant Readings of the Western Text of the Acts of the Apostles 111 the Gentiles attending the synagogue as God-fearers (the two groups were mentioned in that order at 14.1) against the Gentile believers. Luke uses elsewhere a similar procedure, of making two parallel statements that apply to distinct groups of people (cf., e.g., 2.12-13 [The Message of Acts, I, pp. 164]; 16.4 D05, see Commentary, ad loc.). The function of αὐτοῖϛ is most likely to be a dative of interest (dativus commodi, Winer, Grammar, p. 265, 4.b), meaning that the persecution the leaders incited among the Jews was in favour of, or with reference to, themselves (this is a Greek construction for which there is no need to see an Aramaism [B-D-R, §192; cf. Metzger, Commentary, p. 370]). If αὐτοῖϛ were to be taken to refer to the believers, with the dative expressing the people against whom the persecution was directed (cf. Bailly, ἐπάγω, II: ‘κινδύνουϛ τινί, Isa. 69.2, susciter des périls à quelqu’un’), the expression διωγμὸν κατὰ τῶν δικαίων could be understood as a complete phrase, describing the type of persecution that was instigated rather than simply repeating the indirect object. Delebecque (Les deux Actes, p. 90) takes τῶν δικαίων, in accord- ance with good Greek, as a neuter (‘the things that are right’), giving the meaning ‘persecution contrary to what was right’. The explanation on its own is plausible, but it causes the parallel with the following phrase to be lost (Delebecque wrongly attributes ἐπήγειραν to D05 as well as to B03, pp. 330,; 406, n. 17). ὁ δὲ κύριοϛ ἔδωκεν ταχὺ εἰρήνην D, dominus autem dedit confestim pacem d a b dem gig p w vgms syhmg mae; Cass Beda | ὀ δὲ θεὸϛ εἰρ. ἐποίησεν E || om. B P74 ) rell. The presence of the sentence in D05 is explained as a secondary ac- cretion to smooth away the problems of the alternative text (Metzger, Commentary, pp. 370–71; Bruce, Text, p. 277; Barrett, I, p. 669). 14.3 διέτριψαν παρρησιαζόμενοι B P74 ) rell || διατρίψαντεϛ παρρησια<σά>μενοι D(*).A (commorati sunt habita fiducia d) gig. The sentence in D05 has no finite verb but two aorist participles, with the support of the Old Latin gig suggesting that it is not simply a scribal error: ‘Le διατρίψαντεϛ de D, soutenu par g[ig], est l’écho d’une structure de phrase aujourd’hui perdue; ces deux témoins n’ont aucun verbe princi- pal dans la phrase’ (Boismard and Lamouille, II, p. 97; pace Delebecque, Les deux Actes, pp. 90–91). Another occurrence of the same structure is found at 3.5 D05, where the verb εἶναι is to be supplied (B-D-R, §468,. 2, and n. 3; cf. M.S. Smith, ‘Grammatically Speaking’: The Participle as a Main Verb of Clauses [Predicative Participle] in Direct Discourse and Narrative in Pre-Mishnaic Hebrew’, in T. Muraoka and J.F. Elwode [eds],