Many years ago I was comparing various translations of the Bible. I became especially curious about a major difference in the way the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians was handled. In the King James Version the word “charity” was used -- but in every translation in the 19th and 20th centuries, "charity" was changed to “love.” I started wondering about why that change happened. The more I looked into ideas about why “charity” was dumped, the more I started thinking that something very important had been dropped from our religious understanding about what had happened to the first Christians.
As I looked into this change, the main reason I kept running across was corruption in the English language. It seems that in Great Britain and America the word “charity” had become so ruined from its original meaning that the word could no longer be used for translating the Bible. That struck me as very strange.
That language corruption played right into what I was seeing happen among various Christian groups about the word “love.” I wondered about the arguing among Christian groups about various religious meanings of love. Some groups want to downplay emphasis on forgiveness and love, because that takes away from emphasis on sin and divine judgement. Other groups want to claim that love is the central concern of Christianity. The “sin and judgement” groups seem to claim that there is something weak about loving -- that somehow love weakens ‘true, born-again’ Christians. But on the other hand I noticed that the groups, who emphasized the central importance of love to Christian identity, seemed to have all kinds of different interpretations of what love meant to Christians in the First Century and today.
As I continued looking into the change in meaning when translating 1 Cor. 13, I found that ever since the 1920s an increasing number of people claimed that the problem started because of the differences between the Greek, Latin, and English languages. The translators of the King James version only used the Latin Bible. The claim was that if they would have gone back to the original Greek New Testament, they would have found that in the Greek language there were several different words for love, and that one of those words was “agape.” But was that really the case?
I found out that at the same time those claims were made about the Greek language, there was always a side comment made that originally “agape” was an obscure, arcane word that was not used by the common people. Almost no one used “agape” before the Greek-speaking Jews then the Christians started using it!
Just about the only times it ever appeared outside of Christian writings was in a religious context, and there it seemed to mean something like “devotion.” So it was not a common word for love, and what Christians (especially St. Paul) did was transform that word by giving it a meaning unique to certain Christian groups.
That means we have a problem in understanding what the first Greek-speaking Christians were doing. If they would have wanted to talk about love, they would have used one of the common Greek words for love, like “philia” or “eros.” And "agape" was not a common word for love. Actually, they did use “philia” in many places. On the other hand, if they purposely did not want to mean the word “love” when they used their word “agape,” then what happens when we translate “agape” with our common word “love?” Do we radically change the meaning from what the first Christians wanted to say? The meaning is still changed even if we stick qualifiers onto it like "self-sacrificial," "Pure," "divine," "unconditional" or any of a number I've seen used.
So maybe the King James Version of the Bible was correct in not using “love” at all in the whole chapter of 1 Cor. 13. The team of scholars who put together that historically important 16th Century translation from Latin into English were following the lead of translators in France who used the word from Old French: “charite.” So the Latin “caritas” became the English “charity.”
That means the Latin translation didn’t use the Latin word for love, and the French translation didn’t use the French word for love, and so the first major English translation followed that important tradition and didn’t use the English word “love.” Why? Were they implying that St. Paul didn’t want the word “love” used there? So what happens when we stick in the word love? We completely change what St. Paul was trying to do there!
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The idea for this blog came when I was re-reading a book by the Roman Catholic mystic Thomas Merton. It was his book of essays about other forms of mysticism, Mystics and Zen Masters. In his chapter on “Love and Tao” he used the Latin translation of First John 4:8 -- “Deus caritas est.” He felt the need to explain that “caritas” referred to “Pure Love.” As I re-read that chapter after almost 4 years from the time I first read it, I began to get the sense that he was not talking about what we normally call love. Of course, “Pure Love” was not a good translation either of “caritas/agape.”
That reminded me of the sense that I got the last time I re-read 1 Corinthians 13. I wondered, What if Paul was not trying to explain love to the Corinthian Christians? (Why would he need to explain love?) What if, instead, he was trying to explain why he was trying to get them to use a word that almost no one ever used anymore, and he was making it the most important word for all Christians. That word, of course, was “agape.”
So what was Paul trying to illustrate in 1 Cor. 13? Why did he end chapter 12 by claiming that he was about to show his reader “a more excellent way” than all of the spiritual gifts he had been discussing? Was he actually laying the groundwork for the spiritual breakthrough he later wrote to the Romans when he said, “the agape of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given to us?” (Romans 5:5 --The Jerusalem Bible)
On purpose I did not try to translate “agape” because I’ve come to believe that Paul would not want it translated. As a word, “agape” was just as unusual to the people he addressed as it is to us today. And that is just as it should be. What if Paul was purposely using it in a completely new way because he wanted it to be considered to be a new word for a new spiritual way of living?
To try seeing what that would be like, I’ve started re-reading Paul’s letters, and in every place where he used the noun “agape” (instead of the verb "agapao"), I leave it as “agape” instead of using that unfortunately misused and misunderstood English word “love.”
So after you’ve read this, give it a try yourself. Start putting “agape” back where it was meant to be, and then follow along with this blog in the weeks ahead.
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