Not "Save" but "Rescue"

If you were to guess how many verses Jesus uses the Greek words translated as “save” and “sin” in the same verse, what number would you guess? Less than ten? Less than five? You can do it yourself with this link, searching Christswords.com on sozo and hamartia. Didn’t seem to work? That is because the answer may surprise you. The number is zero. Jesus never used the words together. Even stranger is the fact that if we search the New Testament for the English words “save” and “sin” together in the same verse, the number is also zero. The links to the searches in the Blue Letter Bible are here for the KJV, NIV, and NLT.

This means that not only did Jesus not talk about saving us from sin, but nor did Paul or any of the other authors of the New Testament. The word translated as “sin” actually means “mistake,” discussed in this article. However, this is something more and more ministers are admitting openly these days during their sermons, that the wrd translated as “sin” means”mssing the mark,” but this hasn’t changed any Biblical translations yet that I have seen.

Is it odd for me to think the disconnect between “sin” and “being saved” is surprising given what Christianity teaches today? If we were to go to any local minister or priest and ask, “What did Jesus save us from?” What would they most likely say? I would guess the topic of “sin” would come up more oftenthan not.

The Greek Word Sozo

We must wonder what is going on here. The answer is largely tied up with the real meaning of the word translated as “save.” The word sozo (σώζω), sometimes spelled in Greek as soizo, means "save from death," "keep alive," "keep safe," "preserve," "maintain," "keep in mind," "carry off safely," and "rescue." I prefer “rescue” because that word fits better into the sense of most Jesus' versex.

Only in the Bible and Biblical Lexicons do we find it as meaning “to deliver from the penalties of the Messianic judgment” (Strong’s). So, Strong admits, describing that definition as the word’s “Biblical” meaning, that the meaning of the word has been changed in Christianity.

Maybe the problem is the Jesus talked about saving from “judgment” instead of “sin.” We can do that search as well. The results are the same. The most common Greek word translated as “judgment,” is krisis. The answer to the seach of this with sozo is the same, no such verse (krisis search. And if we search the English translations? Nothing in the NT connectst “save” with “judgment” either, in the KJV, NIV, and NLT. This shocks me, especially considering how “loosey-goosey” the NLT is when it comes to respecting the actual Greek words Jesus used. If they were paying attention, they probably would have fixed this somewhere, somehow.

But if the NT writers didn’t understand “save” as relating to sin or judgment, what did they think the word meant? Exactly what everyone else thought at the time, keeping people safe, and, if in danger, rescuing them. The root word is a Greek noun meaning “safe.”

The word sozo is only used by Jesus only in twenty-five verses. This means that it is the forty-nineth most common verb that Jesus uses. Since Jesus only used the word translated as “sin” twenty-eight times, the chance that both words would appear in the same verse were always remote. But if the ideas were as closely related in Jesus’s teaching as they are now, wouldn’t there be some overlap? We might think so.

What and How Does Jesus Save?

The most common answer to this “what” question is the “self,” that is, the psyche. The word is confusingly translated as “life,” “spirit” and ‘soul” but all these meanings are misleading as we discuss in this article. Psyche is used with sozo in five verses. Mark 8:35 is a good example:

NIV: For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it.
Listeners Heard: Because someone when he wants to rescue this, his own self, he will demolish it. Someone, however, when he demolishes that self of his one account of me and the good news, he will rescue it.

The Greek word translated as “life” is psyhe, not the Greek word that means “life” in the sense of a living creature.

The most common used to answer to the “how are we saved” question is “trust, pistis, a word misleadingly translated as “faith,” see this article. Pistis is also used with sozo in five verses. But all of these verses are spoken in a very specific situation: when Jesus has healed someone. The word “save,” however, is often hidden in these translations. Don’t aske me why. Mark 5:34 is a good example here:

NIV: Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.
Listeners Heard: Daughter, this trust of yours has rescued you, depart in peace and be healthy from that scourge of yours. 

In most English translations of these types of verses, the use of sozo is obscured, inone way or another. The KJV version of the above translated it as “made whole. I am not sure why. Is it because Jesus is saying that he didn’t save them by that their trust saved themselves?

For its other fifteen verses, Jesus address rescuing people in a variety of contexts. A common one is in discussion of the “Last Day,” another article here, which more often seems to me to be about the destruction of Israel rather than the end of the world. In two of these verses used the word translated as '“the end,” which actually means “the culmination” is used. Here, Matthew 24:13  is a good example.

NIV: but the one who stands firm to the end will be saved.
Listeners Heard: The one, however, standing firm up to the culmination? Tthis one will be rescued.

My Takeaway

Jesus says many interesting things about how he rescues us and how we rescue ourselves. If I am every tempted by my readers to write more philosophical analysis rather than an analysis of our English translation, I would certainly do some work on it, but whatever he meant, it is wiped away by all the empty messages of “Jesus saves.” I actually do trust the trusting in Jesus can rescue us from all types of worthlessness, but I don’t see Christians as too simple to contemplate what he really said.