Sep 24
Looking again at Rom 3:25
The more I look at translations of Romans 3:25, the more I feel that you would need a fairly full understanding of Reformation teaching to make much sense of the English. (I’m only focusing on the initial part of the verse.) But consider first the very literal (not optimal) HCSB:
God presented Him as a propitiation through faith in His blood
This is echoed by others:
[Jesus] whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, by his blood (NAB)
God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood.(NIV)
I submit that this doesn’t make sense as English: grammatically faith here can either refer back to God or to Jesus (hold on to that thought), yet the translators of these versions would be clear it was the faith of those who believed in Jesus. Some translations decide to spell it out a little further.
[Jesus] whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. (ESV)
[Jesus] whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. (NRSV)
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith (TNIV)
These are slightly clearer in English, but have achieved that at the cost of loading a single preposition – διὰ (dia) – with a theological theory. I say slightly clearer, but ESV could unfortunately be easily read out of context as us, recognising what God has done, receiving his propitiation of us! I’m also not at all sure of the NRSV implication that God’s work only becomes “effective” through faith, though supporters of limited atonement will no doubt rejoice that this liberal translation is so Calvinist.
With all these difficulties the NET plumps for one particular theory and some very specific translation choices, and paraphrases completely:
God publicly displayed him at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith
This (and it has several footnotes) has the merit of being clear English. It does depend on buying in to a particular theory of the meaning of ἱλαστήριον (hilasterion), which while it has arguments in its favour, is by no means assured of full acceptance.
I would note, however, that this is one of those places where (at least if you don’t buy the NET theories, and even to some extent if you do) there is a fairly clear argument for going with the idea that here we are actually talking about Christ’s faithfulness rather than human faith. Then, instead of all these contortions with English we have a relatively clear meaning:
ὃν προέθετο ὁ θεὸς ἱλαστήριον διὰ [τῆς] πίστεως ἐν τῷ αὐτοῦ αἵματι
[Jesus] whom God put forward as a means of atonement on account of his being faithful to death.
The thought is not a million miles away from that embedded in Philippians 2:6-11.
September 25th, 2007 at 12:09 am
I totally agree. While I don’t think Paul’s own words in 3:25f are particular clear, the situation is really not helped by translators deciding Paul as a good Reformed Protestant and translating accordingly.
There’s still a few important decisions that need to be made in the translation of this verse though: the meanings of hilasterion and haimati, and whose faithfulness is it?
The blood-faith word combination lends itself to a martyrdom interpretation, since these are common martyrdom words, and arguably even hilasterion lends support to this because it’s present in the Maccabean martyrdom accounts which are by far the closest parallel to Romans 3:25.
But equally the blood-hilasterion word combination lends itself to a blood-sacrifice reading. With “mercy seat” and atoning blood, which either we then have faith in, or that Christ faithfully shed.
I’ve been browsing the scholarship on hilasterion recently, and I’ve come to the view that it fairly definitely means “appeasing gift”. (I’m going to post on this myself shortly, Bailey’s work is the most useful, he simply draws 100% wrong conclusions from the evidence he analyses) And thus the blood-faith combination points to Christ’s faithful death.
The only decision then left to make is whether the appeasing gift of Christ is targeted from God to humanity, or from God to God on behalf of humanity, and though Protestant tradition favors the latter, the natural reading of Paul’s words would favor the former.
September 25th, 2007 at 10:06 am
I’ll look forward to seeing your post: could you include a link back here? In the meantime, I’ll keep to the vague expression “means of atonement” since I’m not convinced the linguistic arguments are persuasive either way.