An Added Wrinkle

This is now, beloved, the second letter I am writing to you in which I am stirring up your sincere mind by way of reminder, 2 Peter 3:1 NASB

Sincere mind– How often have you heard someone say, “Well, at least he’s sincere.”  Or maybe, “What he lacks in understanding he makes up for in sincerity.”  In our common use of the word, “sincere” typically suggests a deep commitment, a kind of prized moral virtue that exemplifies someone free of deceit, a genuine person.  But it didn’t always mean this, and the fact that the meaning of the word has evolved has exegetical ramifications.  In other words, when Peter wrote eilikrinḗs dianoian (translated “sincere mind”) he wasn’t necessarily speaking about anything personal at all.

“The word [sincere] enters the English language in the first third of the sixteenth century, considerably later than its appearance in French.  It derived from the Latin word sincerus and first meant exactly what the Latin word means in its literal use—clean, or sound, or pure . . . and serves to remind us that the word in its early use referred primarily not to persons but to things, both material and immaterial [e.g., a sincere wine or sincere doctrine] . . . As used in the early sixteenth century in respect to persons, it is largely metaphorical—a man’s life is sincere in the sense of being sound, or pure, or whole; or consistent in its virtuousness.  But it soon came to mean the absence of dissimulation or feigning or pretense.”[1]

So here we have an added wrinkle in our attempts to understand what the ancient authors of the Bible really meant.  What is that wrinkle?  It’s simply this: our own vocabulary of translation has evolved.  Even if we use a translated word that we think captures the original sense of the text, that translation word may no longer retain even its original meaning.  The actual Greek meaning of eilikrinḗs, translated “sincere,” is “tested by the light of the sun,” derived as it is from two other Greek words, εἵλη (ἁλέα, ἥλιος) and κρίνω, that is, “warmth of the sun,” and “to test.”  Nothing personal at all.  And notice something else about this original Greek meaning. It is not an internal, moral condition.  It is about public examination.

When the translators picked “sincere” to interpret Peter’s Greek, they inadvertently incorporated a word that never really meant what it means to us today.  They picked an English word that they thought best captured the idea of genuine purity, but even this idea has evolved over the centuries.  So we are left with a double translation problem, first to figure out how to express the original word and then to figure out how to express the original in a way that does not accidentally include some other evolved meaning.  But this is the double problem of all translation, not just biblical.  Languages change over time, and working with a language that is more than 2000 years old requires considerably more effort than looking in a contemporary dictionary.

Topical Index: sincere, eilikrinḗs, translation, 2 Peter 3:1

[1]Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, pp. 12-13.