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A First Discovery from Philippians in the Greek
I go through some parts of the New Testament in Greek. John, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, and James so far. I wasn’t going to do Paul next, but Philippians seemed like it would be nice. So Philippians it is. 1:10 is interesting. Here’s the Greek-English side-by-side. It threw me for a loop at first. I have the ESV translation in my head: “So that you may approve what is excellent and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ.” But the Greek vocabulary doesn’t seem like that at all. For “approve” we have δοκιμάζω/dokimazo, and for “what is excellent” we have διαφέρω/diaphero in a participle form, something like “things being excellent.”
But dokimazo means “put to the test, prove, examine” or “distinguish by testing, approve after testing.” And diaphero literally means what carries through–“to carry through, carry about, to differ, make a difference, surpass.”
Weird–“so that you may test the things that carry through”??? Definitely not as clear as the simple English “approve things that are excellent.”
But try these expanded translations on for size:
. . . so that you may prove by testing the things that carry on.
. . . so that you may prove by testing the things that endure.
Now that makes some sense.
It’s not just approving good things–your mind liking some things that are good.
It’s also not about testing things to learn whether they work.
What we’re talking about is taking things you already know work and proving them again by testing them in you own life–or, to stick with the context, in your own church community.
That’s basically what life is all about, isn’t it? Every generation has to learn the same lessons all the earlier generations learned about what things carry through–about the things that endure, the things that carry us through to the end, the things that are excellent.
If we’re wise, we’ll take some inherited wisdom and prove those things again by living them. Of course, if we’re foolish we’ll probably still end up proving them again–the hard way.
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Whether Paul meant “test everything and approve the things that make it thru” or “include in your life only that which is tested”, it’s easy to see why science became a paradigm of Christian civilizations.
I have long enjoyed Philippians because I think of the diversity of the first believers in Europe as described in Acts. A wealthy businesswoman who led a ladies prayer meeting, a jailer and his family who witnessed what could have become a jailbreak and a fatal disaster, a slave girl who was delivered from a spirit of python and others. The letter is written to them and those who joined them.
I particularly like the way the Geneva Bible translates 1:8:
“For God is my record, how I long after you all from the very heart root in Jesus Christ.”
Now don’t make me go look up that verse in one of the Thessalonians. I’m too tired!
You could translate it literally as “the guts of Christ Jesus.”
Well, there is the line about the beans, so . . . maybe, maybe not.
The root of approve is, I assume, “prove.” Approve mean essentially “to show to be true, prove, demonstrate.” And that which “endures” indicates, to prove those things that are permanently true.
Coincidentally, this ties in with what I had just written a half hour before seeing your post concerning choice, testing, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and knowledge (and even the nature of what we call Original Sin, but that’s not pertinent to this).
The same thing also applies to the Tree of Good and Evil. As for your interpretation, I would say that things that endure means things that are permanent. The NKJV says, “that you may approve the things that are excellent…” The NASV says, “so that you may discover the things that are excellent…” Both of these have to do contextually with proving the good things in life; with “He who began a good work among you will complete it,” and “that your love may overflow,” and “real knowledge and all discernment,” and afterwards, “having been filled with the fruit of righteousness.”
There is also 1 Corinthians 11:19, “For there also have to be factions among you, so that those who are approved may become evident among you.” Contextually I’d say that those who are approved, are proved experientially to the knowledge of witnesses.
NKJV: “that those who are approved [or proved] may be recognized among you.” (You’ve discussed “recognition” before regarding the canon of Scriptures.)
KJV: “that they which are approved [or proved] may be made manifest among you.”
I haven’t figured it all out, but your article helps clarify my thinking, that (1) a test is, of course, experiential, and (2) it proves what one already knows, but it also adds the knowledge that one knows what one knows — it proves that he knows it. One can know no to put one’s hand into a whirling table saw blade, but this is rather esoteric knowledge and unproven by the holder of the knowledge until one is actually presented with a running table saw. Then can one actually say, “I now know I know not to put my hands into a table saw,” and the guy congratulates you by shaking you hand well done, or you can say, “I now know I know not to put my hand into a table saw, and that’s why you call me Lefty.”
In other words, the Tree of Good and Evil did not supernaturally imbue the eaters of the fruit with knowledge, it experientially tested and proved the knowledge that they already had (don’t eat; it’s bad) but didn’t necessarily believe, or recognize, or choose to follow. And believing God is a big deal. And afterwards they had no excuse.
Well, I won’t vent my spleen on this here.
Ages ago in grad school at Notre Dame I wrote a paper on 1 Thessalonians and how it seemed to contain a pre-reflective form of the justification faith doctrine later spelled out in Romans. The purpose of the paper was to refute Krister Stendahl’s position that justification by faith was meant to address only the limited situation of how to deal with the rights of gentiles in the church, and not to answer the more general question of how one is to be saved. The word “dokimazo” was central to my thesis. Paul seems to use it to illustrate how a believer should be able to directly discern the will of God about what is right and wrong. It’s used a couple of times in 1 Thess (2:4 and 5:21) in a rudimentary way which later found expression in verses like Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may test/prove (dokimazein) what is the will of God, what isgood and acceptable and perfect.”
So it seems that the ethical implications of living by faith were already being worked out in Paul’s earliest letter, 1 Thess, which wasn’t concerned with the Jewish-gentile question so prominent in other letters. Which would indicate that the justification by faith issue wasn’t contingent on that issue. There was more to it, but that’s the basic idea.
Yes. Yes. Yes.
I have always like Philippians because it is different from Paul’s epistles in this respect: in the book of Philippians Paul writes to them like they were friends and not just congregants. There were about 21 different types of letters in the Greek world. This is the only one that is called a “friendship letter”.
This all doesn’t relate to the passage you have referenced but we should read Philippians with the friendship angle in mind.