Lost In Translation: Luke 6:33

And if you do good to those who are good to you

Luke 6:33 is interesting because it represents an entire class of Jesus’s verses that are translated in religious terms when Jesus’s listeners would have heard them as economic and practical. And, of course, Jesus always made them entertaining. This verse does more than that. As we see at the end of the article, it contrasts the short-term with the long-term. This contrast is also lost in translation:

As our society has grown more prosperous, we have come to look at Jesus’s lessons as moral ones, but we forget that for most of the last two-thousand years, everyone was focused on their short-term economic survival. Jesus’s message was valuable and widely accepted because it brought our survival into harmony with our relationships with the Divine and with others. It made those relationships a component of our survival. This verse is a good example.

The Verse

The verb translated as “do good,” the noun translated as “thank/credit,” and the noun translated as “sinners” here confuse Jesus’s message. They are highlighted in the biblical translations of Luke 6:33 shown below:

KJV: And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same.
NIV: And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.

Biblical translations always confuse two different Greek words by translating them both as “good” (see this article). The adjective here means “good” in the sense of “valuable, "useful," "worthwhile," and "of high quality.” It is used as a prefix of an unusual verb. The verb root has the primary meaning of "making" or “producing" something or "causing" or "performing" as service. This compound verb describes a productive action, in this case, “creating value.”

This “creating value” verb first appears in the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, in just two verses, Numbers 10:32, and Zephaniah 1:12. The first proclaims that we should share the value the Divine creates for us. The second warns that people make a mistake when they do not trust that the Divine creates value in their own lives. Jesus only uses this word four times in Mark 3:4, Luke 6:9, Luke 6:35, and this one. The first two ask about creating value on the Sabbath and the last one which echoes this verse and acts as a kind of punchline for it. This verb doesn’t appear after the New Testament in Greek literature for almost a thousand years after Jesus. It never appears before.

The Greek word translated as "thank/credit" is has a long-term economic meaning. This word is consistently translated incorrectly in the English Bible, a hundred and thirty times in the KVJ as “grace” and only twenty-six times as other English words like “thank” and “credit.” However, the words used here a closer to the mark. The noun means a favor that one grants, and it has a double meaning in that context. On the part of the doer, it means "kindness" and "goodwill". On the part of the receiver, it means "thankfulness" and "gratitude". This is the deep gratitude that can be repaid by a favor given later.

The word translated as “sinners” means “the erring” or “the mistake-makers.” This word is important to the punchline here. To learn more about this word, read this article.

What Jesus’s Listeners Heard

The basic sense of this verse is:

Because also when you create value for those creating value for you, what gratitude do you get?

They heard this as the idea of producing value for each other as the basis for all economics. This is a commonsense idea. One that everyone understood in a society where goods were traded more often than exchanged for money. Coins were used in the cities and by the Romans. The common people of the countryside, where over ninety percent of the people lived, made their living by trading products they created: fish for wheat, wheat for lambs and so on.

This idea repeats the lesson that Jesus makes at the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7:12:

When you desire that they might produce for you, those people, so much also you yourselves must produce for them.

The word translated as “produce” is the root of the word used here. It is also often mistranslated as “do.” Translating it as “do” mutes its connection with production, which undermines Jesus’s meaning in this verse. Jesus’s lesson in this earlier verse is that people are the ones responsible for all production, and that everything we want must be made by others. We are dependent on each other for everything. This is a bigger picture than just the local, common sense one, but it fit with what everyone knew. Jesus wants everyone to see this natural law as a divine one, recognized by Israel’s enlightened, that is, their prophets.

This verse raises an interesting question: are we grateful for equal exchanges of value?