Weirdos ~ Greg J

Previously: Translators | Saints | Holy Here

All Saints Day Party! ~~~ Name the saints!

What comes to your mind with the mention of “saints”?  People who pray a lot? Kind, generous people? Miracle-workers and martyrs? People in heaven?

Clearly, saints pray. The Bible also speaks about a dozen times of praying for saints.

What about praying to saints? In favor of this claim, the best Biblical reference I can cite is from James 5: “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power...”  What if my prayer partner—hopefully a righteous person—is in heaven? The record suggests that people in heaven are alive (Matt 22:31-33), and whether in Hades or Heaven they can remember their life experiences and can persist in their values. However, we don’t know if they can see or hear us now. God in heaven hears our prayers—but do saints in heaven? If interaction is the point of paired prayer, separation is a problem.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,
we must get rid of every weight and the sin that clings so closely,
and run with endurance the race set out for us,
keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.
For the joy set out for him he endured the cross, disregarding its shame,
and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God.

Hebrews 12:1-2 does not picture the dearly-departed watching us and cheering us on. How vain of us if we think that. Rather, in view of the saints' parade in Hebrews chapter 11, we are to let their faithful lives witness to us. Their examples encourage us to discipline and endurance. Foremost, we look to Jesus both as example and as the one who claimed, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Then he crushed sin and death and overcame the world. Why should we use a lobbyist when we have Jesus?

We have a great high priest who has gone into heaven, and he is Jesus the Son of God.
This is why we must hold on to what we have said about him.
Jesus understands every weakness of ours, because he was tempted
in every way that we are.
But he did not sin!
So whenever we are in need,
we should come
bravely
before the throne of our merciful God.
There we will be treated with undeserved grace, and we will find help.
Hebrews 4:14-16 (CEV)

What have we learned about the saints in the preceding looks at English translations?

(1) Paul opened his letters to Rome, Corinth, Colossae, Ephesus, and Philippi, each addressing “the saints”. Paul carried aid to "the saints" in Jerusalem.
(2) Said saints needed food, money, or release from jail. The saints needed prayer.
(3) Paul’s greetings note that people did not become saints by merit, but by God’s call.

We can add that (4) the New Testament letters mainly corrected the saints' bad choices, bad ideas, and infighting. The New Testament would be around half as long if the saints had been saintly.

But nevertheless Paul called them saints. When the Ephesians and others heard Paul call them “saints”, did they ask, “what’s a saint?” Is this like where Jesus tells Peter, “On this rock I will build my church,”—and Peter replies, “Thanks, Jesus! Uh, what’s a church?” Given that the English language wasn't invented until around seven hundred years later, what word or words did Paul use for "saints" and how did his recipients understand that word?

Online sites offer free tools to identify those original words and the cultural associations they probably held for their writers and readers. Let’s demonstrate. The screenshot here captures a web browser on my iPhone. It was opened to www.BibleGateway.com.

I typed Ephesians 4:12 and chose to search in the Mounce Reverse Interlinear New Testament. Then I tapped the search button 🔍.  The result follows below.

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Aha! This shows that in Ephesians 4:12 the English word “saints” comes from the Greek word family of hagios.

Hagios is the representative from the family of words translated to “saints”.

Hagios is not necessarily the specific word used in Ephesians 4:12. We’ll come to that word soon. Like English, Greek has slightly different words for singular “saint”, plural “saints”, possessive “saint’s” or “saints’”, and more. The suffix on a Greek word communicates much more than in English.

“Interlinear” means that we start with the Greek or Hebrew source lines and with each source word list a corresponding translated word or phrase. “Reverse Interlinear” shown here means we start with a translation (such as the KJV, NIV, or ESV). Then with each word or phrase of the translation (like “saints”) comes the corresponding transliterated Greek or Hebrew source word family (such as hagios) or the specific source word (such as hagion) or  its Greek form (ἁγίων). Either way you do it, this is a quick way to find the corresponding source for a translation.

Footnote: if your aim is to master biblical Greek, an Interlinear is poison.  If your aim is to quickly identify a translation/source relationship, an Interlinear is an expedient, compact tool. Don't expect the crowded presentation to detail nuances or other usage. In this case, hagios applies to "saints". As we'll see, hagios can be the source of other translated words such as "holy" and "purified".

Here’s the good part: With BibleGateway Mounce Reverse Interlinear and other such tools, just click on saints or hagios.

Boom! We get details about the hagios family:  A short list of some ways hagios words are translated, and a long list of all the Bible verses in which hagios words appear.  See below.

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Footnote: Pronounce hagios as “HAHG-ee-ohss”, like the pork-based breakfast cereal. This is supposedly the first-century pronunciation. I'm confident that Paul and Barnabas are not going to pop up to correct us. Modern Greek tends to differ in pronunciation from ancient Greek..

Sigh. I thought I might be a saint.

However, the meanings associated with hagios intimidate me! 

  holy,
   consecrated,
      separate from common condition and use,
  dedicated,
     pure,
       righteous.

In short, saints are weirdos.

Of course, I’m joking—but not much. You’ll see. And I suppose “weirdo” does fit me.

That's the dictionary. Much later, I'll comment on dangers of dictionaries. They list many possible meanings or translations of a word, but might not identify the specific meaning or translation for a specific passage such as Ephesians 4:12.

The display here also starts a concordance, a list of all verses that contain some form of the Greek word hagios. These verses show trends in meaning.

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Continuing the demo: If you see a link “everywhere hagios appears in the New Testament“, click it!

In some situations such as here, Bible Gateway just goes ahead and displays this list.  You can scroll down through 222 New Testament verses where some member of the hagios family appears. “Word family” is called “Lexical Form”. You will find that hagios words are all about holy things:

Holy Spirit, holy city, holy man, holy angels, holy child, holy name, holy prophets, holy covenant, holy kiss, …

Eventually we get to Ephesians 4:12.

Aha, in that verse the English word translated “saints” comes from the specific Greek word hagiōn (ἁγίων).

A little before that, in Ephesians 3:18, “saints” comes from hagiois.

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BibleGateway also offers a Hebrew and Greek reverse interlinear for the New International Version—if you paid for the BibleGateway PLUS subscription. If you have not logged on as a PLUS user you can demonstrate this feature, but only occasional sample verses show the Greek text.  Open a passage in the New International Version, say Ephesians 4. Click the gear icon ⚙ to set Options. Turn on "Reverse Interlinear". As with Mounce, just click a word to see its source family.

My favorite free point-and-click Greek and Hebrew interlinear is at https://www.esv.org. In your web browser open that site. Register for a free login ID by clicking Sign In then Create an account. After login you have Greek and Hebrew tools that are otherwise hidden. The initial screen will display a Bible chapter.  Click on the title to select the book and chapter you want, or to pull up all verses for a word family or word.

Then in the upper left click the three dots ••• then Language Tools. This displays 3 choices: a Hebrew Old Testament, the 1995 NA28 Nestle-Aland, and the 2017 THGNT Tyndale House Greek New Testament.  I usually select Tyndale House. For now it is newer. This interlinear displays the specific Greek word such as hagion for Ephesians 12:4. Clicking on hagion or “saints” will display the hagios word family information, including a glossary entry and a list of verses. There are options (the  ••• on the right) to switch display between just Original Language, Interlinear, and Reverse Interlinear. Poke around, see what the other options do.

Yet another interlinear tool is at www.stepbible.org, a free service of Tyndale House, Cambridge, UK. This lets you stack or interleave source text together with several translations including non-English translations. Then with just a click on a word, get its brief definitions, grammatical notes, and concordance list of verses.

Sifting the Saints

Paul starts 1 Corinthians with his typically long greeting:

Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother,
to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified [hagiazō] in Christ Jesus,
called to be saints [hagios]
together with all those who in every place
call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:
Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I always thank my God for you...

Nope.

After this warm opening embrace, Paul starts beating up the hagios saints.  By chapter 6, we get this:

You yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers and sisters. Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified [hagiazoi], you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

So I'm thinking, the saints at Corinth were not pretty figurines, too cool for school, too clean for the scene.  Maybe I can be a saint after all.  So I kept investigating the hagios family.

Hagios was not a new word. When speaking Greek, the Jews for hundreds of years had applied hagios to themselves. “We are God’s chosen people, God’s holy people, hagios.”

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When speaking Greek, the Jews called Jerusalem the hagios polis, the holy city. The Bible? Hagios graphe, holy writings. For the Jew, hagios conveyed purity, cleanness, a ritually sanitary state. Hagios was about washing clean and staying clean. The Greek word hagios approximately translated the Hebrew word spoken as kodosh. Approximately. The old rabbis would sigh and point out that this Greek word hagios failed to convey the historical Hebrew kodosh attitudes of surrender, dedication, separation, and faithfulness to the Almighty and to his law.

When people look at me, when people look at you, they see a Bible translation.  Modern rabbi Abraham Heschel wisely observes that, “It may be difficult to convey to others what we think, but it is not difficult to convey to others what we live.”

Greek people hearing the Jews would roll their eyes. The Greeks of the first century AD used hagios in a broader sense than the Jews. Hagios described any objects of worship, any places of worship, any stuff associated with a supernatural being, anything inspiring awe, dread, or utmost caution. It could be from the Canaanites, the Egyptians, the Jews, or the Greek pantheon.  Whatever prompted a call to Ghostbusters.

To the Greeks, hagios described something spooky, something awful, something… just… weird.

How do I in 2024 northern Virginia know what Jews and Greeks thought 2000 years ago?  One way is to search for translations like “saints”. Multiple uses give me multiple contexts. As a child I learned most of my native language not from a dictionary but from repeated collisions with contexts. Biblical contexts offer a sense of what the word meant to its users—as opposed to the way, after thousands of years, that word is used around moi. That inspection of contexts is what we have been doing here.

A second way is demonstrated above. Even without significant experience in Greek or Hebrew, you can use an interlinear translation to find the corresponding source language words such as hagios or hagion. Consider the brief definitions of that word. Use the concordance or search feature and consider the contexts you discover.

Paul uses the word “saints” a lot. More precisely, when talking about ordinary Christians, Paul uses hagios words over 38 times.   Yet Paul is hardly the only one reminding Christians about personal holiness. The Psalms reference the kodosh a dozen times. Peter in his first letter adds these word pictures:

As obedient children, do not be conformed
to the passions of your former ignorance, but as
he who called you is holy [hagion],
you also be holy [hagioi] in all your conduct.
...
But you are a chosen race,
a royal priesthood,
a holy nation [hagios ethnos],
a people for his own possession,
that you may proclaim
the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
Once you were not a people,
but now you are God's people.
Once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy.

Be holy.  Live your title, saints! We can talk more about holiness in a rather later installment.

In my next installment, we must talk about dangers of word study that we blithely skipped here. Stay tuned.

Next:  Saints ꓤ Us