Sentence Diagramming
Last lesson, we were looking at Acts 1:18 Οὗτος μὲν οὖν ἐκτήσατο χωρίον, and finished with:
This sentence includes a conjunction οὖν. Conjunctions are never going to be part of the kernel of a sentence, so let's just hang it above the first word.
μὲν is not usually considered a conjunction.
More often, it is to set up a contrasting phrase, where the other part of the contrast is introduced with a δέ. Though not usually translated this way, you could use an "On the one hand...on the other hand" to capture the feeling, as in Matthew 3:11.
On the one hand (μὲν), I baptize you with water, but on the other hand (δέ), Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.
But more often than not, μὲν οὖν, when there is no δέ, sets up an editorial comment by the author. Acts 1:18-19 were not a part of Peter's speech — the actions of Judas were known to all there, and had happened just a few weeks before. These two verses are there as part of Luke's story telling, for the people who were reading this decades later.
Since Luke is using μὲν οὖν as a single grammatical unit, I will treat them as a single conjunction.
Remember that the noun that is the subject of the clause will be in the nominative case, and the noun that is the direct object will be in the accusative case. So then, viewing this through different lenses, we have:
We'll pick this up again in the next lesson.
