“On this rock I will build” . . . My Synagogue? Translating Ekklēsia in the New Testament

In Matthew 16.18, we read “On this rock I will build my church.” ¹ Not “my synagogue.” Why not?

The obvious answer is that churches are Christian and synagogues are Jewish.

Yes, but in the Septuagint (the Greek Old Testament), there is considerable overlap of meaning between the words commonly translated “church” (ekklēsia) and “synagogue” (synagōgē).

Ekklēsia is defined as (1) the act of congregating for a public meeting, or the place for such a meeting (Jdt 6.16: “all their young men and women ran to the assembly”; cf. Obad 13 “nor look, even you, upon their gathering on the day of their ruin”; Deut 18.16 “at Choreb on the day of the assembly”); (2) a large group of gathered people (Joel 2.16: “gather [synagagete] the people. Sanctify an assembly [ekklēsian]”; cf. Mic 2.5; Ps 25[26].5; Sir 26.5; 1 Kgdms [= 1 Sam] 19.20); and (3) a social organisation and body (Deut 23.1: “A castrated male and one made a eunuch shall not enter the assembly of the Lord”; cf. Deut 31.30 [32.1]; Ps 88.6).

Synagōgē is defined as (1) a large assemblage or collection, of people (Gen 28.3: “gatherings of nations”; Exod 12.3: “the whole congregation of the sons of Israel”), but also of water (Gen 1.9: “Let the water that is under the sky be gathered into one gathering”), and of troops (Ezek 32.22; cf. v. 32b), stones (Job 8.17), and bees (Judg 14.8 B); and (2) the act of assembling or bringing together (Exod 23.16: “at the gathering of your labors that are from your field”; similarly Exod 31.22).

So why did the early Christians call themselves ekklēsiai rather than synagōgai? This question was addressed in 2011 by Professor Paul Trebilco of the University of Otago. He argues convincingly that “synagōgē was already in use by Jewish communities as a designation for their groups and their buildings,” so that “through the use of ekklēsia the Hellenists could express their continuity with the OT ‘assembly’ of the people of God and could also distinguish themselves from other Jewish communities, without making the claim that they alone were the heirs of that people” (Trebilco 2011, abstract).

Before turning from the Old Testament to the New, we note in passing a couple of Septuagint occurrences of ekklēsia, for example, “the assembly of the people of God,” Judg 20.2; “the whole assembly of the Lord,” 1 Chr 28.8 (with a variant “assembly of God”), which may seem to anticipate Paul’s distinctive use of the phrase “the ekklēsia of God” (1 Cor 1.2; 10.32) or “of Christ” (Rom 16.16). But in the New Testament there is considerable divergence between the two: synagōgē refers almost exclusively (with the probable exception of Jas 2.2: “suppose a man comes into your meeting wearing a gold ring and fine clothes”) to Jewish institutions (including buildings: Luke 7.5: “he loves our nation and has built our synagogue”), while ekklēsia mostly refers to Christian groups, whether local or universal (with the exception of Acts 7.38; 19.32, 39, 40; Heb 2.12; 12.23).

In neither Old nor New Testament does ekklēsia refer to a building. In the New Testament, but not yet in the Old, synagōgē may denote a building. (Whether remains of third-century B.C. Jewish prayer houses found in Egypt were called synagogues is another question; see Chilton and Yamauchi 2000, 1145–53.)

In the Synoptic Gospels, references to synagogues consistently show distancing from Judaism. Where Matthew is generally dependent on Mark, and Mark writes “synagogue(s),” Matthew several times has “their synagogue(s)” (Matt 9.35; 12.9; 13.54; a specific geographical reference may be intended in Mark 1.23, 39; cf. Matt 23.34, where Jesus is represented as saying to “teachers of the Law and Pharisees,” “others you will flog in your synagogues”). In the context of Luke 4.15, “their synagogues” means synagogues in Galilee; in Acts, Luke’s frequent references to them are neutral. John rarely (6.59; 18.20) mentions them. The extreme negative associations of the term “synagogue” are reached in Revelation’s “synagogue of Satan” (2.9; 3.9).

Otherwise, in broadly Pauline texts, including his farewell to the Ephesian elders (Acts 20.12ff.) but not the letter to the Ephesians, in 1 Timothy, and recognised Pauline letters, there are signs of an earlier distancing between “synagogue” and “church.” Paul never mentions synagogues.

These are individually small but cumulatively significant indications of a movement which, already before the Gospels were written, caused Paul to make a threefold distinction between Jews, Greeks, and “the church of God” (1 Cor 10.32); only a step from Tertullian’s description of Christians (ca. 200) as “a third race [tertium genus]” (Tertullian, Ad Nationes 1.8, cited in Dunn 2015, xi )—as James Dunn (2015) puts it, “neither Jew nor Greek.”

Returning to our starting-point in Matt 16.18, “On this rock I will build my ekklēsia” is a text most of the problems of which we shall pass by on the other side. Astonishingly, it is one of only two texts in the canonical Gospels to use the term ekklēsia. The other, also in Matthew (18.17), is, as the NIV heading has it, about “Dealing with sin in the church.” “If [a fellow-Christian] sins,” and the offender refuses to listen to fellow believers, then “tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.”

With so little evidence to go on, it is hard to say what ekklēsia meant to Matthew. What is more, there is a serious difference between the two texts. Matthew 16.18 looks to a future building of the ekklēsia (“I will build my ekklēsia”), while 18.17 envisages an ekklēsia already constituted and developing its own discipline.

In the ears of most modern listeners, the words “I will build my church” evoke the image of a majestic cathedral, such as certainly did not exist for generations after the Gospels were written. The words are certainly metaphorical: I do not know a scholar of any confession who would force a literal interpretation on them, such as: “In the place where your body, Peter, will lie, I will cause a great basilica to be dedicated in your honour.”

Modern readers’ problems with “church” (all the more deeply rooted for being largely subconscious) illustrate the common confusion between derivation (etymology) and meaning. As a boy, I remember, perhaps at a time when I was deep into the colonialist novels of G. A. Henty, being shocked by my father telling me: “You’re a native.” Or to take another example, it is true that the English word “minister” was borrowed from a Latin term meaning “servant”; but we do not normally give that meaning to the incumbent of a church or to the Prime Minister or First Minister of a country. It doesn’t help to be told, “‘minister’ really means ‘servant’.”

So it is with the English word “church.” A distinguished biblical scholar of an earlier generation wrote:

The word “Church” means “belonging to the Lord” (kuriakon); hence the Slavonic Cerkov, the German Kirche, the Scottish Kirk, and the English Church. The word is therefore not a translation of the Biblical word Ekklēsia, but an admirable paraphrase of it. (Sir Edwin Hoskins, in a 1930 paper quoted in MacKinnon 1940, 24)

But if we look up “church” in the current (12th) edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, we find a rather different definition, doubtless based on current usage:

1 a building used for public Christian worship. 2 (Church) a particular Christian organization with its own distinctive doctrines. 3 institutionalized religion as a political or social force: the separation of church and state.

I need hardly say that none of these definitions corresponds to the meaning of ekklēsia in any part of the Greek Bible; usage, as always, has taken over from etymology.

A couple of leaps through the centuries may help us to follow this development. For Augustine, the church is the body of Christ (De Trinitate IV.12) acting through its bishops (De Trinitate XV.46). Anselm’s major writings did not focus on the church, but his turbulent life history showed the church as a centre of power focused on himself as Archbishop of Canterbury, and thus a counterpoise to the power of the king. For Thomas Aquinas, the church is more directly the hierarchy: “The church . . . visits the penalty of excommunication” Summa Theologiae II/9; “The greatest authority of all is church tradition” II/12 (Thomas Aquinas 1989).

For Martin Luther, by contrast, “It is the preaching about Christ, the proclamation of the Word, that is constitutive of the Church; for though the Church is the mother of Christians it is not the mother, but the daughter of the Word” (Watson 1947, 169, and especially Rupp 1953, 310–43). John Wesley was not concerned with ecclesiology as an academic discipline, but in his Sermon on “The Cure of Evil-Speaking,” he defines Matthew’s “Tell it to the church” as “tell it to the elder or elders of the church” (Sermon XLIII, iii.1). In some parts of England “church” means “Church of England”; other people go to chapel. In parts of Ireland and Scotland, by contrast, “chapel” means “Roman Catholic.”

This is just one example of how circumstances change the meaning of words. In German, undesirable associations of the word Reich (the Third Reich) led the translators of the common language Gute Nachricht Bibel (GuNB) to translate “Reich Gottes” (kingdom of God) by “die neue Welt Gottes” (God’s new world), with a literal translation in a footnote. On a wider scale, it would be an interesting exercise to plot the use and avoidance of the word “Führer” from 1934. (“Reiseführer” for “guide book” is admitted, but not “Der Führer” applied to anyone but Hitler; see “What the Führer means for Germans today,” The Economist December 16, 2015).

So how, as practical translators of the New Testament, are we to translate ekklēsia—subject, as always, to the resources of the target language and the intended readership?

New Testaments in major languages fall in this respect into three unequal groups. Most generally translate the Greek ekklēsia (and Vulgate ecclesia) consistently as “church” or a formal equivalent, whether the text refers to a local or house church or to the church universal. The moderately literal 2011 edition of NIV retains “church” in both places in Matthew: “on this rock I will build my church,” and “tell it to the church.” So does the less literal Good News Bible (GNB). Similarly the French common language translation La Bible en français courant (FC) retains “Église” in both places. There are exceptions: NIV has in 1 Cor 14.33b, “as in all the congregations of God’s people” for Hos en pasais tais ekklēsiais ton hagion; in 1 Cor 14.34 GNB has “the women should keep quiet in the meetings”; and beginning in 1 Cor 11.18, FC has several times “assemblée(s)”; in 14.33 “communautés chrétiennes.”

In Pauline texts, the picture is more varied. In Paul’s address to the elders of the church in Ephesus (Acts 20.28), the marginally preferred reading is “the church of God” (alternatively “the church of the Lord”; see the extensive discussion in Metzger 1994, 425–27). In 1 Cor 11.18, where NIV has “when you come together as a church [en ekklēsia],” GNB has simply “in your meetings”; compare the German common language translation “wenn ihr zusammenkommt” (when you come together). But in 14.23 the emphatic ean oun synelthē hē ekklēsia holē epi to auto becomes “If, then, the whole church comes together.” (Ellingworth 1998 argued that this suggests a distinction between local house churches and a plenary assembly of Christians in a large city such as Corinth.) In 1 Cor 14.28, GNB’s “But if no one is there who can explain, then the one who speaks in strange tongues must be quiet,” “there” recalls the translation of sunerchēsthe (you come together) in v. 26 as, “When you meet for worship.”

A second group of Bible translations consists largely of German versions, from Luther’s version to its 2017 revision, which consistently translate ekklēsia as “Gemeinde” (community), in 1 Cor 14.33b expanded to “Wie in allen Gemeinden der Heiligen” (as in all communities of the saints), similarly in the German common language GuNB: “Wie es bei allen christlichen Gemeinden üblich ist” (as is the practice in all Christian communities).

A third option, occasionally found in versions already mentioned, consists of the translation of ekklēsia by “community” or a synonym, plus some expansion where necessary to identify the community in question. The second (2001) edition of the Italian interconfessional translation Parola del Signore (TILC) reads in Matt 16.18: “su di te, come su una pietra, io costrirò la mia comunità” (On you, as on a rock, I will build my community), and in Matt 18.17: “va’ a riferire il fatto alla comunità dei credenti” (go and report the matter to the community of believers). (The first [1985] edition had the literal la mia Chiesa. ² )

The choice between these options appears in the translation of the texts which formed the starting-point of this enquiry:

Matthew 16.18

NIV 2011: on this rock I will build my church

GNB 2015: on this rock foundation I will build my church

FC: sur cette pierre je construirai mon Église (= Church)

Lu 2017: auf diesen Felsen will ich meine Gemeinde (= community) bauen

GuNB: auf deisem Felsen werde ich meine Gemeinde (= community) bauen!

TILC 2001: su di te, come su una pietra, io costruirò la mia comunità (= community).

Matthew 18.17

NIV: If they refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

GNB: And if he [your brother, v. 15] will not listen to them [one or two other persons, v. 16], then tell the whole thing to the church. Finally, if he will not listen to the church, treat him as though he were a pagan or a tax collector.

FC: Mais s’il refuse de les écouter, dis-le à l’Église (= Church) et s’il refuse d’écouter l’Église, considère-le comme un incroyant ou un collecteur d’impôts.

Lu 2017: Hört er auf die [Zeugen] nicht, so sage es der Gemeinde (= community). Hört er auf die Gemeinde nicht, so sei er für dich wie ein Heide und Zöllner.

GuNB: Wenn er immer noch hören will, dann bring die Angelegenheit vor der Gemeinde (= community). Wenn er nicht einmal auf die Gemeinde hört, dann behandle ihn wie einen Ungläubigen oder Betrüger.

TILC 2001: Se non vuole ascoltare nemmeno loro, va’ a riferire il fatto alla comunità dei credenti (= community of believers). Se poi non ascolterà neppure la comunità, consideralo come un pagano o un estraneo.

The purpose of this article has not been to press for Bible translations of a particular type, but to suggest that, at least for general use and in changing circumstances, a less literal rendering may convey more closely the meaning of the text.