God Didn't Say That

How to be a Biblical Man

The ESV translation of 1 Corinthians 16:13 has Paul tell his audience to “act like men.” This tradition of translation goes back at least as far as the KJV, which renders the text “[behave] like men.” The NRSV, on the other hand, offers “be courageous.” What’s going on?

At issue is the Greek verb andrizomai. That word contains the root andr, which also gives us the word aner, “man.” (The “d” drops in and out, in accordance with Greek grammar. Aner is a “man,” and adres are “men,” for example.)

But the leap from the root andr to the translation “act like men” makes three mistakes.

The first is the wrong assumption that internal structure tells you what a word means. (I have more here: “Five Ways Your Bible Translation Distorts the Original Meaning of the Text.”) Relatedly, the root actually means “person,” not “man,” which we see from words like androphonos in 1 Timithy 1:9. The word phonos means “murder,” but androphonos means “murderer,” not “murderer of men.” (Similarly, “manslaughter” in English doesn’t only mean “slaughtering men.”) So we have methodological and factual errors.

More importantly, though, even if the word meant “be a man” in Greek, it’s not clear that “be a man” would be the right translation in English, because the very notion of what it means to be a man depends on culture. This is particularly relevant in light of John Piper’s talk advocating a masculine ministry, and similar propositions supposedly founded in the text.

For example, we have a huge divide in the West between those cultures that adopted chivalry (mostly Western Europe) and those that did not (in the East). In my own life, for example, I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that my instinctive reaction when a boy kicks a girl is more severe than when a girl kicks a boy. That’s because I’m still influenced by chivalry. This is also, I believe, why America has yet to have a female president even though places ranging from Israel to Pakistan (hardly a trailblazer for equal rights) have had female prime ministers. Similarly, women were rulers in antiquity, as in the case of Cleopatra VII, who ruled Egypt until a few decades before Jesus was born. So for (some) Americans, “be a man” might deal with being chivalrous or even having presidential qualities, while the same was not true in antiquity.

Similarly, in English, “do your job as a man and marry her” makes sense in certain circumstances, yet surely Paul wasn’t telling people to go out and marry. I know that in some cultures, it is the man’s responsibility to execute honor killings, but, again, Paul certainly wasn’t advocating vengeance. And as yet another example, it has frequently been noted that masculinity is often associated with excess alcohol consumption, a goal Paul obviously wasn’t promoting.

Likewise, Yiddish has an expression to “be a mensch,” and mostly it means to be kind and honest. It has little to do with physical prowess and everything to do with integrity. Though mensch is better translated “person” than “man,” it demonstrates the same point that words convey different symbolic meanings in different cultures.

Though the verb andrizomai appears only once in the NT, we find it with more regularity in the LXX, frequently as the translation for the Hebrew “be strong” in the expression “be strong and courageous.” This is why translations tend to run along the lines of “be brave,” “have courage,” etc.

But we should be clear. This may or may not have had anything to do with masculinity. (Dr. Bill Mounce draws a similar conclusion.)

And, more generally, I think that when we transport charged words like “man” across millennia and cultures we have to be careful not to read our modern understandings into the ancient texts.

March 2, 2012 - Posted by Joel H. | translation practice, translation theory | 1 Corinthians 16:13, Bible, Bible translation, gender, translation, translation theory