Ship of the Dead
and all the brethren who are with me, To the churches of Galatia: Galatians 1:2 NASB
Churches – In 1349, a ship carrying wool set out from England, bound for some destination in the north. During its journey, crew members started dying. Attempts to quarantine the sick on board failed. The Black Plague took one person after another, until every last crew member died. The disease itself lived on in the other creatures aboard. The ship ran aground near Bergen harbor in Norway, where its living inhabitants — rats and fleas — made it into the country. The result was devastating. The Plague killed as much as thirty percent of Norway’s population. Entire villages were erased. The country never recovered until modern times.
Why do you need to know this little bit of Norwegian history? Because it is a reminder that even “empty” ships can carry lethal plagues. In biblical exegesis, the empty ship is the word ekklēsía, which we all know doesn’t mean “church,” despite the continual propaganda found in nearly all Christian Bibles. This empty “ship” carries a lethal theological disease even if we recognize that ekklēsía is not “church,” because the idea of “church” is already planted in our culture and it is the culture that communicates our religious experience. Listen to the remarks of Anders Runesson:
“New discoveries, new understanding, are therefore, and must inescapably be, the result of our conscious effort to disentangle what we have encountered from the familiar that we know. New insights are thus dependent on our willingness to de-familiarize ourselves with the phenomena we seek to understand; on our refusal to let our familiar, already in-use mindset and concepts control and categorize that which we encounter.”[1]
“Terminological edifices are built slowly over time and are not easily torn down. Now-unsustainable scholarly ideas from previous eras influence current discourses, because many of us still occupy the space created by the terminological walls, arches, and ceilings they have left behind . . . conclusions we give birth to become offspring of the language we use.”[2]
Runesson’s discussion of the development of “church” goes on to show that the meaning of the term “is not dependent on the form of the ‘vessel’ but on the sounds, feelings, and discursive habits that people pour into it as it is made to perform its duties in different cultures.”[3] This explains why the portico of the Basilica of the Assumption in Nazareth exhibits the Madonna and child in multiple ethnic forms, from Scandinavian to Chinese. Mary and Jesus are not human beings. They are ideas that serve a purpose within the context of the Church.
If Runesson is correct, then certain serious implications pertain to the modern Messianic world. First, merely adopting Hebrew vocabulary does nothing to change the underlying presuppositions of the religious community. The sounds, feelings, habits, and purposes of the community remain within the context of the birth culture. In other words, most Messianic communities are simply the “Church” sprinkled with Hebrew spices. The underlying theology is still Christian, right down to doctrines like Original Sin and the Trinity. Once an attendee learns a few Hebrew phrases, the prayers, songs, and ritual fit an already-established familiarity. Anyone who has attended an orthodox synagogue is immediately aware of the significant disparity between Messianic congregations and synagogue members.
Secondly, transition from Christian to Jewish thinking in community or in exegesis is considerably more difficult than we often realize. It isn’t that fact that ekklēsía doesn’t mean “church.” It is the fact that “church” calls forth subconscious images that the vessel ekklēsía can never bear. And ekklēsía is but one of dozens of significant Greek/Hebrew words that are affected by our birth culture thinking. We might realize that Jews do not think of Law, land, and promise in the way Christians do, but that doesn’t mean we have left our built-in bias behind. The problem is highlighted by the fact that there are seventeen different terms in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin that are used to describe what contemporary believers call “church.” But we don’t know this, nor do we know that these terms had no fixed definitions in the ancient world and, consequently, the ideas represented by them were in flux until the Church solidified its message. Now that we do know, we must ask, “What other terms, crucial to believing, are just as flexible, just as interchangeable, and just as birth-culture dependent?” “What other ideas have I unconsciously imported into my religious understanding simply because I was familiar with them?”
Faith, salvation, obedience, law, gospel, kingdom, sin, forgiveness, repentance, grace, love: here are some of the terms that need to be very carefully examined; terms that we are too comfortable with to recognize our own bias. Terms that need to be unpacked from our assumptions so that we might grasp, if possible, the meaning of God’s words in the lives of the men who heard them.
Topical Index: ekklēsía, church, language, paradigm, Runesson, Galatians 1:2
[1] Anders Runesson, “The Question of Terminology,” in Mark Nanos and Magnus Zetterholm (eds.), Paul within Judaism: Restoring the First-Century Context of the Apostle (Fortress Press, 2015), pp. 55-56.
[2] Ibid., p. 58.
[3] Ibid., p. 63.
