Set them to judge who are least esteemed

Last week we looked at a bunch of recent stories involving Christians facing their day in court thanks to their (allegedly) defrauding other Christians.

This had me revisiting the sorely abused New Testament passage that deals with this very thing. This is part of Paul’s first letter to the stumbling and struggling new community in Corinth where some of the new Christians were — among other things — suing one another in court. In 1 Corinthians 6:1-11, Paul tells them that this isn’t a good look. It makes us Christians look bad, he notes, when we’re taking each other to secular court to settle the question of which one of us got ripped off by the others and who has to repay who.

It’s a fair point, the core of which is Paul’s stern reminder that ripping off and defrauding one another is not something any of them ought to be doing: “You yourselves wrong and defraud — and brothers and sisters at that.” The sorely abused bit is his argument that if they can’t refrain from defrauding one another, then the least they could do is to stop airing all of their dirty laundry in public by constantly taking one another to court.

That’s just the sort of thing that gets strip-mined into a clobber-text to suggest that Christians ought to just lie back and take it when they get defrauded and wronged by their fellow Christians, which is not at all the point here. Nor does it make much sense to read this as Paul instructing the Corinthian Christians that they should never seek to defend their rights in court. That would make Paul a raging hypocrite given, oh, the entire second half of the book of Acts.

At the end of Paul’s little lecture here we get another passage that also gets weaponized as a clobber-text in the service of The Powers That Be. This is the bit where he reminds the Corinthians to stop acting like thieves and swindlers because “thieves, the greedy … swindlers — none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.” Paul includes a bunch of other types he urges them not to be here, and that list thus gets turned into a cudgel swung by those who seek to turn this passage, and the whole Bible, into a Rulebook About Other People’s Sex Lives. (A maneuver often preferred by those desperate to distract from Paul’s condemnation of thieving, greed, and swindling due to their own investment and enrichment via the same.)

That notorious list has been the subject of intensive exegetical debate ever since the early 20th Century when some of the words there started getting translated into the anachronistic English-language term “homosexuals.” There are whole aisles in seminary libraries devoted to the fierce battle over the translation of 1 Corinthians 6:9-11.

But that’s not what I want to discuss here because it’s not nearly as interesting as the utter lack of controversy involving the far trickier questions involving the translation of 1 Corinthians 6:4.

This verse gets translated into English in very different ways. Most contemporary English translations present it as a rhetorical question, as in the ESV: “So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church?” That’s a departure from the King James Version I learned as a kid, which doesn’t add that question mark. The KJV, following Wycliffe and the Geneva Bible, translates this as a commandment or, at least, as advice: “If then ye have judgments of things pertaining to this life, set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church.”

I am not a Greek scholar. I’m not even sure how to pronounce “gyro” when ordering takeout. But as I understand it, both of these translations are plausible interpretations of the meaning of the original. Both also seem wholly compatible with the surrounding text. And both are congruent with Paul’s rhetorical style and with themes he argues elsewhere.

What we’ve got in the original colloquial ancient Greek is something about people who lack standing in the church and something like “ought to judge.” The grammar doesn’t give us an unambiguous idea of what to do with that and we’re working here without any punctuation. So both sets of translators supply some added syntax to turn this into a readable, meaningful phrase in English.

Paul starts this section by saying, “When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints?” and both of these translations seek to render verse 4 as something that follows logically from that. The more recent translations add another question mark, turning verse 4 into one of those ironic “What, then …?” questions Paul loves to use to emphasize his point. (“What, then, shall we sin that grace may abound?” etc. The answer to these rhetorical questions in Paul is always “No.” Or, perhaps, “No, duh.”) Hence the New NRSV: “ If you have ordinary cases, then, do you appoint as judges those who have no standing in the church?”

That works. It’s a plausible reading of the original (I’m told). It corresponds with the point Paul makes back in verse 1. And it sounds like Paul.

But all of that is also true of the KJV’s earlier, very different translation, in which rather than an emphatic rhetorical question repeating what they’re not supposed to be doing, verse 4 becomes the one thing those more recent translations never include: Instructions for what the Corinthians are supposed to be doing. After telling the Corinthians in verse 1 not to go to court “before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints” the KJV has Paul in verse 4 telling them how to go to court “before the saints.”

And this bit of instruction/commandment/advice — “set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church” — closely echoes a major theme woven throughout this letter to the Corinthians. Think of the long analogy later in the epistle in which he tells them “Those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honorable we treat with special honor. … God has put the body together, giving greater honor to the parts that lacked it.”

Or think of back in the first chapter, where Paul warns against the foolishness of those most esteemed for their wisdom, introducing the recurring motif of resolving divisions in the Corinthian community by esteeming the lowly and humbling the proud.

This translation also seems to me to be far easier to reconcile with Paul’s own emphatic assertion of his right to defend his rights in the secular courts of Felix and Festus. At the same time, it shows him urging the community of believers not to imitate and copy the form of such courts, but to do it differently — according to what he describes in this same letter as “the most excellent way.”

That’s sort of John Calvin’s take on this passage in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, in which he assumes the same meaning as that found in our English KJV. Calvin takes pains to show that Paul wasn’t challenging the legitimacy of the secular magistrates, but merely arguing that disputes within the community ought to be resolved within the community. Paul’s suggestion that they “set them to judge who are least esteemed in the church” is, for Calvin, simply a way of saying that “Even the lowest and meanest among you will discharge this office better than those unbelieving judges to whom you have recourse.”

There’s a whole lot going on there, for Calvin, who turns this into a rant about the papacy and gets so distracted by his insistence that bishops not be seduced into serving as magistrates that he fails to appreciate how this passage reinforces Paul’s insistent message to the Corinthians about esteeming those least esteemed among them. Contra Calvin, Paul wasn’t saying something about “even the lowest and meanest among you.” He was, rather, reminding the Corinthians yet again that many of their troubles arose from them imagining that there ought to be any such category as “the lowest and meanest among you.”

But my point there is that, for Calvin and for most of the theologians in the non-English-speaking Reformation, the meaning of 1 Corinthians 6:4 was the one we find in our English KJV, not the one we find in our English NIV or NRSV.

Again, I have small Latin and less Greek. I am not a translator and I am in no way qualified to judge the accuracy of anyone who is. Like everyone else reading the Bible in the un-original English, I am forced to defer to and to trust the expertise of translators almost blindly. But from what I’ve found and read about this dispute over the translation of 1 Corinthians 6:4, it’s not terribly disputatious. We’re offered two legitimately plausible possibilities. either of which might be correct and neither of which is certain.

Both translations work. So which do you prefer?

I prefer the meaning found in the KJV, not due to any understanding of the original Greek, nor due to the fact that this seems to be the understanding of folks like Calvin and Chrysostom. I like it better because “Set them to judge who are least esteemed in the community” seems like a wise antidote to the some of the ugliest horrors we’ve seen within the church.

What happens when bishops are called on to judge accusations against bishops? Those who are most esteemed in the community judge and act in a way that seems concerned, primarily, with defending that esteem — with protecting their reputation, rather than with doing right for the victims of the thieves, the greedy, the swindlers, and the sexually predatory.

Want to change that? Well, then set them to judge who are least esteemed. Reserve judgment seats for widows, orphans, the poor, and for the aliens, outsiders, and outcasts. Let them tell you what is or is not fair.