"Church"

In this article, we look at a concept that is central to modern Christianity but one that was, at least in its current meaning, completely unfamiliar to Jesus. You might guess that topic from the title of this article. If the “church” is the bride of Christ, it was an arranged marriage where he never met the bride.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. If Jesus came to start a “church” he certainly failed to focus on the idea. He only used the Greek word translated as “church” twice. Today’s church pins its matrimonial hopes to only one of those verses. However, Jesus would have never seen the word he used so rarely as meaning a “church” in today’s sense of the word. In his time, the Greek word did not refer to anything even remotely religious.

The Greek

As usual, we have to start with the Greek word and what it means. The word translated in the NT as “church” is ekklesia (ἐκκλησίᾳ)—for more about how these links connect to my research, read this article. This is a feminine noun in Greek, which works rather nicely for the “bride of Christ” metaphor, but the word actually means an "assembly duly called."

It describes an impromptu assembly of local people called away from their jobs to meet and discuss a community matter. The idea here is something less formal than our idea of a jury or court. It was a group of peers or citizens rather than a formal government organ.  It was first used to describe the civic assemblies in the Greek city-states of Athens, Sparta, and so on. It appears in the work of Homer to describe the assemblies leading to the war with Troy. It was not a council or group of representatives, but a group of citizens.

However, though citizens had some say in the city-states of Greece, they had no such power in the Roman-ruled Galilee and Judea of Jesus’s era. These assemblies dealt with community matters that could be handled by individuals. They had no legal power to fine or imprison. Romans might grant such powers to more formal groups, such as councils, but not a random group of citizens.

There is a verb form of the word, ἐκκλησιάζω (ekklesiazo) a word that Jesus never used and one which doesn’t seem to be used in the New Testament. However, this is hard to prove because some forms of the verb has the same letters as the noun. However, the verb form does not appear in Strong’s Concordance, so that is a strong indication that the verb v\has not been recognized in the NT. This verb comes from two Greek words. It root is the verb meaning "to call, ” kaleo. The prefix ek, means “out of,” “from,” and “away from."

The Biblical History of Translation

Though Jesus only used the word twice, it appears over a hundred times in the New Testament. However, it also appears seventy-seven times in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament. The interesting thing here is that, in the New Testament, the word is almost always translated as “church.” In the Old Testament, the source of the Greek word is never translated as “church.”

Of course, the Old Testament supposedly comes from Hebrew not Greek. I say “supposedly” because the actual path of understanding its verses was Hebrew to Greek, to Latin, and then to English, the flow of religious thinking over the millennia. The Hebrew word translated as ekklesia is qāhēl (קָהָל). Like ekklesia, that word means “assembly,” “company,” “congregation,” and “convocation.” Again, the word never has the sense of a religious meeting. Another interesting fact is that qāhēl isn’t always translated into ekklesia. As often it is translated into another word whose meaning has changed over the millennia, synagogue, another untranslated Greek word that means “meeting,” “assembly,” and “meeting house.” (This word is explained in this article on the Bible’s untranslated words.)

Verses in the Old Testament that use this word refer to any gathering of people from the common populace. Mostly it refers to the assemblies of the Israelites because the Old Testament is their story, but these gatherings were not primarily religious. They seem to be gatherings mostly for the purposes of planning wars, but it depends on the size and location of the gathering and why people were being gathered together.

The point is, it was never used to refer to different sects of religious worship or to religious worship services. Jesus and his listeners could not have heard it that way. Through its use in the Epistles, primarily those of Paul, ekklesia came to mean "church" but this process took centuries. If you had asked Paul what he was doing, he would have said he was organizing groups of people who followed Jesus. It would be some time before the idea of churches and religious denominations would evolve.

Jesus’s Use

Jesus only used ekklesia twice, in Matthew 16:18 and in Matthew 18:17 (these link to the detailed analysis of the Greek and English in these verses). The word does not appear at all in Mark, Luke, or John. Let us look briefly at the two verses. First we have Matthew 16:18:

NIV: And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
Listeners Heard: And so I myself say to you that you yourself are Rocky and upon this, the rock, I will construct of me this assembly, and entrances of death will not overpower it.

There is a lot of interesting things going on in this verse, too much to explain here. To get the details, go to the article containing the research. But focusing on this one word, Jesus was clearly referring to building his group of followers. The reference to “hades” likely refers to its metaphorical meaning as death rather than the Greek underworld. Jesus’s point is that death, especially his own, would stop his group of followers from being constructed.

Let us look now at Matthew 18:17:

NIV: If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.
Listeners Heard: When, however, he misunderstands them, speak to the group. When, however, he also misunderstands the group, should he be to you the same as the foreigner and the tax collector?

For the “group” here, you could also put “community” or “assembly.” The point is that you should make your dispute public at that point, not that you should bring it to some religious leaders or some such.

Conclusions

It is easy to understand why the Church as it evolved, wanted to write itself into the New Testament. This was easy to do because, long before there was anything like a church, there were voluntary assemblies of citizens. After all, the Greek word, ekklesia, has come to mean both “church” and “meeting house” in modern Greek. However, it has lost its historical generic meaning of “public assembly.”

Does this mean modern translators don’t know the historical meaning at the time of Jesus? Honestly, I don’t know what they know. There is a lot I don’t know, but I only discover what it is over time. However, I can tell from their translation what is important to them: defending the current Christian concept of “church.” Given that this is their mission, they do the best they can.