nothing too juicy, just an article from Sojourner's Magazine I found talking about "secret siblings". I thought it was interesting...
"Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and
sister, and mother" - Jesus (Mark 3:35).
"Their first lawgiver [Jesus] persuaded them that they
are all brothers and sisters of each other after they have
transgressed once for all by denying the Greek gods." - Lucian
of Samosata
(The Passing of Peregrinus, 2nd century C.E.)
If one of Paul's contemporaries could time-travel to the
21st century and read popular English translations of his
letters, puzzlement would surely provoke some questions:
"Why in so many passages has the Greek word for
'brothers' been mistranslated using non-family terms?
Don't the translators know that Paul's favorite way of
referring to us was as his 'sisters' and
'brothers'? Why has one of the most important features
of our new identity in Christ been hidden from these English
readers?"
Jesus is remembered by both friend and foe (as in comments by
Mark and Lucian, above) to have redefined the basis and limits of
family life, rejecting blood ties in favor of the faith-based
sibling-like bond that he created among his followers. Persons
who do God's will have become Jesus' siblings with God
alone as their parent (see Mark 3:35, Matthew 12:50, and Luke
8:21). Most English translations of the gospels do faithfully
report that fact. Yet this translational accuracy disappears in
many English versions of Paul's letters.
A close reading of Paul's Greek in his letters reveals
that he not only knew about Jesus' radical redefinition of
"family" but also made it his core relational term to
describe the converts in the faith-related, household-based
congregations to whom he wrote. Paul profoundly affirmed and
implemented Jesus' vision of a society based on the
surrogate kinship of faith-related siblings. This shared vision
undermined blood-kinship obligations in favor of relationships
rooted in the individually chosen and deeply shared commitment to
the will of God as revealed by this Jesus. Paul's basic
model for his new communities was a family of such "brothers
and sisters," without any person in the group, including
himself, enjoying the traditional authority and privileges of an
earthly parent.
For most modern English readers, however, Paul's strong
emphasis on sibling relationships is a "secret." Two
factors keep it that way: 1) cross-culturally insensitive
translations and 2) interpreters who uncritically assume that
first-century brothers and sisters related to each other as
siblings frequently do in contemporary Western culture. Note
first that inadequate translations from the Greek have used
nonrelational terms such as "one," "another,"
"friend," and the individualistic term
"believer" to render the Greek words for
"sister" and "brother" (in the NRSV and often
the NIV). And often Paul's general term for "brothers
and sisters" together (adelphoi) is limited to the
"brothers" alone (as in KJV, RSV, NIV), thereby making
the "sisters" invisible and obscuring one of
Paul's most consistently inclusive applications of his
baptismal teaching that in Christ "there is no longer male
and female" (Galatians 3:28).
The Greek words for "sister" (adelphe) and
"brother" (adelphos) share the same root: delphys,
meaning "womb." In the most literal sense, these adelph
words designate persons born from the same mother. The plural, adelphoi,
means "brothers" or "brothers and sisters,"
according to context. There was no other Greek term available for
Paul to use that embraced all female and male offspring in one
family, of whatever age. So the context is, as usual, critical
for determining meaning. In Paul's letters the reader may
anticipate that the context calls for the translation
"brothers and sisters" or "siblings," the
inclusive and concise English word that I use most frequently in
my teaching and writing.
For many of us, there is little in our own socialization and
experience to help us connect with Paul's approach here. The
phenomenal mobility of persons in Western culture permits them to
live far away from the family members with whom they grew up,
weakening sibling ties. Such readers easily fail to feel the
impact of Paul's emphasis on brother/sister rhetoric as
leverage for changing the behavior of the followers of Jesus in
his care.
Sibling Solidarity
How, then, can we best
position ourselves to "get" what Paul sought to
communicate? First we must put aside our "common sense"
views of family life. For example, it is widely assumed in modern
Western family life that the adult individual will usually
experience her or his deepest sense of emotional bonding in
marriage. In sharp contrast, the tightest unity of loyalty and
affection in the world of the early followers of Jesus was found
among brothers and sisters. It is exceedingly significant,
therefore, that Paul chose to regard even married followers of
Christ first of all as surrogate brothers and sisters of each
other, rather than simply wife and husband. For example, his line
of reasoning in 1 Corinthians 7 repeatedly emphasizes that the
"sisters" have their identity primarily "in
Christ" rather than in their blood families or in a
subordinate relation to their husbands. As such they are declared
the sexual equals of believing husbands (7:4-5) and the spiritual
"powerhouses" in marriages to nonbelievers (7:13-16).
As such, Paul identified "our sister Phoebe" as a
leader of the house church in Cenchrae, with no mention of any
male figure except Paul, who calls her his "patron"
(Romans 16:1-2).
Such radical social consequences of the gospel met serious
resistance among his converts. Why?
The parents of these followers of Jesus certainly had taught
them how biological siblings should relate to each
other—with fairness and generosity. At the same time, the
parents had raised them to regard everyone outside the
blood-related family as a potential challenger of the honor of
the family and of every individual within it. Thus, if those
responding to Paul's message had simply been peers from one
social group or class, Paul's house congregations already
would have been tension-filled, because these people had
previously regarded each other as competitors for recognition and
honor.
Yet Paul's challenge was made substantially greater by
the fact that he had proclaimed a radically inclusive message,
resulting in an astonishing diversity in his house congregations.
They confounded conventional Mediterranean group expectations
because of their cross-class social makeup, embracing men and
women of every economic status and all local ethnic backgrounds.
This questionable melange was not accidental, as if Paul had to
settle for whatever response he inspired. Rather it seems quite
intentional, as a direct extension of the historical Jesus'
practice of radical inclusivity (see 1 Corinthians 1:26-31).
Paul's statement that in Christ there was neither Jew nor
Greek, male nor female, slave nor free (Galatians 3:28) meant
both that every man and woman was welcome without discrimination
and that these status indicators were to play no role in the
everyday life and relationships within his groups.
So Paul made a daring and risky move when seeking to persuade
persons from such disparate backgrounds to think of themselves as
"family." Yet it was logical, brilliant, and true to
the Jesus tradition for Paul to chose sibling language to
describe the relationships among the followers of Christ.
Tricky Translations
In 1 Corinthians alone,
Paul employs brother-sister terms 41 times, only once to refer to
persons who are biologically related, namely, "the brothers
of the Lord" (9:5). In the other 40 passages, Paul addresses
the various persons in the Corinthian house congregations as his
own siblings and siblings of each other. Yet in the NRSV, in 13
of the sentences in which Paul uses some form of the root adelph the translators have substituted such non-family-related words as "believer," "friends," and even the pronoun
"one of them," sharply diminishing for the modern
reader the intended force of Paul's rhetoric. These
followers of Christ often remain "secret siblings"
because translators have used non-family terms to translate
Paul's words.
I assume that it was these translators' intention to
express male and female inclusion by using just one word, in
combination with a literary desire to avoid frequent repetition
of the phrase "brothers and sisters," that led them to
substitute for "brother" or "sister" such
gender-neutral terms as "friends," "beloved,"
and "believers." Nevertheless, such substitutions
regularly "pull the plug" on the force of Paul's
intended challenge to his hearers to treat each other like true
siblings at their best. Perhaps the NRSV translation of 1
Corinthians 6:1-11 displays the most striking example of this
translation error, totally obscuring Paul's appeal to
surrogate family obligations: "Can it be that there is no
one among you wise enough to decide between one believer (adelphos,
'brother') and another, but a believer (adelphos)
goes to court against a believer (adelphos)—and
before unbelievers at that?" (6:5-6)
This passage opens a window on a particularly egregious
violation of sibling values: suing each other in a court of law.
The high density of sibling language here powerfully illustrates
Paul's use of this rhetoric in his attempt to resocialize
his converts and change their behavior, focusing in this case on
the economically elite among them.
The translators decided to emphasize the contrast between the
followers of Christ—the "believers"—and the
"unbelievers" (apistoi) to whom they had turned
to judge their law suits. This is good as far as it goes, but
spectacularly misses Paul's central point: Siblings
don't sue each other! Such an action would declare to the
world that the litigants no longer regarded each other as part of
the same family. In Paul's words: "To have lawsuits at
all with one another is already a defeat for you" (6:7). If
they regarded each other as siblings, they would suffer injury
rather than sue (Paul writes "defraud") each other.
While their motives might have been good, the NRSV
translators' work has produced two particularly negative
consequences. First, using the nonrelational word
"believer" plays into the hands of the kind of
individualism and lack of concern for others that Paul did so
much to resist and transform among his own converts. Such
individualism and isolation from others have developed into
strikingly unpleasant and unjust social norms in Western culture,
especially in the United States, where "looking out for
number one" is urged upon us at every turn. Second, this
frequent substitution of non-family terms when translating
Paul's use of the adelph group obscures the original
cultural context and substantially weakens the punch of
Paul's exhortations for modern readers of every cultural
background.
S. Scott Bartchy was professor of Christian origins and the
history of religion at UCLA and director of UCLA's Center
for the Study of Religion when this article appeared.