“You claim
titles don’t matter to you, but you behave like a prince and expect me to wait
on you like a servant! Saying it means nothing if your actions betray you!”
Merlin S2 E2 ‘The Once and Future Queen’1
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| So it turns out that the search term ‘servant’ doesn’t yield an awful lot in the way of stock photos, but I thought this guy’s expression was hilarious. He is so done. Thanks to artur84 at freedigitalphotos.net. |
Why hello,
dear reader, how kind of you to stop by. Now what shall we do with the next few
minutes? I say, here’s a thought: how about we scrutinise a decision made by certain
translators of the Bible into English and make ourselves cross about it? … Yes,
I agree, it is a simply splendid idea. So glad you could join me for a
jolly time. Such fun.2
To this
end, then, I present to you Romans 16:1, according to a selection of English
renderings generally considered to be towards the literal, verbatim end of the
spectrum as translations go:
I commend
to you our sister Phoebe, a servant of the church at Cenchreae. (ESV)
I commend to
you Phoebe our sister, who is a servant of the church in Cenchrea. (NKJV)
I commend
to you our sister Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea. (NASB)
I commend
to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae. (NRSV)
All very similar,
right? Leaving aside minor questions of apposition versus relative clause and
so forth, the only discrepancy is whether Phoebe was a ‘servant’ or a ‘deacon’ –
but if I tell you that the relevant Greek word is διάκονος (diákonos),
which means ‘servant’, it becomes clear that all that’s happened is that some English
versions have opted for a technical term which is actually derived from the
Greek, and others for a word with a different etymology which is nevertheless
more readily comprehensible to your average English speaker. Either
possibility, therefore, is a completely reasonable translation. Nothing to be
cross about so far.
No, the thing to be cross about comes when one compares Romans 16:1 to
Ephesians 6:21:
So that you also may know how I am and what I am doing, Tychicus the
beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord will tell you everything. (ESV)
But that you also may know my affairs and how I am doing, Tychicus, a
beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord, will make all things known
to you. (NKJV)
But that you also may know about my circumstances, how I am doing,
Tychicus, the beloved brother and faithful minister in the Lord, will make
everything known to you. (NASB)
So that you also may know how I am and what I am doing, Tychicus will tell
you everything. He is a dear brother and a faithful minister in the Lord. (NRSV)
As you can see, those are the same four translations – good, solid,
word-for-word-type translations, none of your dynamic-equivalence malarkey here,
thank you – and again, aside from a few minor differences, they seem pretty
well agreed on what this verse means. The problem I have is that the word they’ve
all translated ‘minister’ is in fact διάκονος again.
Now, of course there are often good grounds, when one Greek word appears in
two different verses, to render each instance with a different English word. No
one English word, after all, is ever going to cover the exact same range of possible
meanings as any one Greek word, so sometimes the context of a particular
occurrence demands that it be translated differently there to how it is
elsewhere. However, I’d like to stress that the reason I picked out Ephesians
6:21 as my point of comparison is because what’s going on in it is so
remarkably similar to what’s going on in Romans 16:1. Each of these verses refers
to the person charged with delivering the letter, and constitutes Paul’s endorsement
of that individual as a committed servant of Christ, a brother or sister in him3
who ought to be warmly received as such. Each, additionally, comes at the exact
same point in the structure of the letter, right at the beginning of the very end
section devoted to final greetings and/or blessings. The context, therefore, provides
absolutely no pretext to translate διάκονος differently in
one verse to the other.
That’s all to be taken in light of the fact that ‘minister’ is a perfectly
good translation of διάκονος as well. ‘Minister’, as in one who
ministers – one who attends to someone else’s needs – a servant, in other
words. Indeed, that is, in my opinion, the key thing to grasp about what the
word διάκονος as used in the New Testament is getting at.
This was the word Jesus used when he told his disciples that they were not to
exercise authority over one another like the Gentiles, but rather that whoever
would be great among them must be their servant; when he said that
whoever would be first among them must be last, and servant of all.4
Whatever contrary impressions one might get from the way the word tends to be
used today, being a minister is not about being in charge or being important; in
fact, it’s about the complete and total opposite. It’s about being a servant.
Interestingly, when used as an adjective, διάκονος could even mean
something like ‘servile’ or ‘menial’,5 which might offer a fuller
picture of the kind of role it referred to, although it isn’t used this way in
the New Testament. At any rate, the fact remains that, according to Jesus’ own
words, being a minister means making oneself least and last for the sake of
others, and is something that all of us who follow him ought to be doing
for one another.
I hasten to add that in saying this I’m not denying the existence of the
specific role of διάκονος, usually translated ‘deacon’, to which some specific individuals within
the church are to be appointed, and others, implicitly, not; Paul describes
that one in 1 Timothy 3.6 But of course, the word still carries the
same implications even when it’s being used to refer to that specific role. To
be appointed a deacon in a special capacity is to be appointed a servant in a
special capacity.
On one level, then, it doesn’t actually matter a great deal whether διάκονος is translated ‘deacon’, ‘servant’, or ‘minister’, because at the end of
the day they all mean the same thing. On another, though, to choose to
translate it ‘servant’ in one instance and ‘minister’ in another, remarkably
similar instance – well, I mean, why? Why do that? I hardly think the
decision can have been made according to whim, or aesthetic concerns – it doesn’t
matter which translation we go for in any given instance, and this one sounds
prettier here, kind of thing. For one thing, all of the given translations
exhibit the same pattern, and yet none I can find exhibits its reverse, that
is, calling Phoebe a minister and Tychicus a servant or deacon.7 For
another, it’s not very generous towards the translation committees to suggest
they took so careless an approach to their work. Mind you, the other forthcoming
explanation doesn’t strike me as very generous towards the translation
committees either, because that one involves me denouncing them as guilty of
misogyny.
I mean, we were all thinking it, right? If there’s no reason from context
to call Tychicus a minister and Phoebe a servant, perhaps the decision was
based on the fact that he was a man and she was a woman. Perhaps people were
uncomfortable applying the term ‘minister’ to a woman, but comfortable enough
applying the term ‘servant’ to her. Which is utterly ridiculous, because, as we’ve
just seen, ‘minister’ and ‘servant’ are the exact same thing. Even if
one takes the most stridently complementarian view one can possibly squeeze out
of the scriptures, that fact emerges entirely unaffected. Ministry is service.
If you don’t have a problem with a woman being a servant, then you can’t have a
problem with her being a minister either. (I speak in purely semantic terms, but
of course, purely semantic terms are precisely the issue on the table.)
Frankly, that last fact before the parentheses seems so entirely obvious –
and even more so as I articulate it – that the more I look at the translations
I cited above, the more I can barely believe what they’ve done. But I’ve racked
my brains for any other plausible reason why they should have opted for ‘servant’
in the one instance and ‘minister’ in the other, and I’ve got nothing. If I’m
missing something, do be so kind as to enlighten me of it.
On the other hand, if I’m not missing something, and if I’ve merely made
you as cross as I am about this whole business, let’s hold back from letting
resentment build in us, and instead avail ourselves of the reminder that every one
of us, women and men alike, is commanded, by the words of our Lord himself, to act
as a διάκονος – a minister, a servant – towards our brothers and
sisters in him. We are to do that after the pattern he demonstrated for us, in
humbling himself even to the death of the cross in order that we might share in
his life and his glory. We are none of us to exercise authority over one
another, none of us to seek to be first and greatest, but all to make ourselves
least and last, just as he who really is first and greatest made himself least
and last for our sake – on which account he has been given the name above every
other name, that at it every knee should bow. Praise the Lord.
Footnotes
1 Thanks to whichever kind human posted the episode transcript
on Merlin’s Myth and Magic: https://merlinsmythandmagic.net/.
2 And having said that, I couldn’t very well not give you
a Miranda clip, now could I? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIDquJbDFf0.
3 Christ, that is, not Paul. Just in case that wasn’t
clear and you were about to denounce me as a heretic.
4 I think of Matthew 20 and 23, and Mark 9 and 10. In
Matthew 23, Jesus contrasts the servant-like attitude he asks of his disciples
with the attitude of the scribes and Pharisees, as part of a pronouncement of
seven woes upon the latter, which I think is really, really convicting: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+23&version=ESVUK.
5 According to the legend that is the Liddell-Scott-Jones
Greek dictionary: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=diakonos&la=greek#lexicon.
7 Some have either ‘minister’ in both verses (e.g. NAB),
or ‘servant’ or ‘deacon’ in both verses (e.g. NIV, HCSB), and once we head
towards the less verbatim end of things some use different renderings
altogether (like ‘helper’ in the NCV and NLT), but I can’t find any that has
Phoebe as a minister and Tychicus as a servant or deacon, which I think is
pretty good evidence for a conscious, agenda-driven translation
decision in the versions cited above.
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