some secrets…about the siblings…

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.