Cohéritiers — The Two Words Paul Had to Invent

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Whose Prisoner

Yesterday this journal established why Paul was in chains: the accusation that he had taken an Ephesian past the temple wall. Today he names himself in the first line of the chapter.

I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for you Gentiles. Moi Paul, le prisonnier de Christ pour vous païens.

Note whose prisoner he says he is. Not Nero's. Not Rome's. Not the Sanhedrin's. He reassigns the custody entirely.

And then he adds two words that give the chains a purpose: for you. The imprisonment is described as being on their behalf, which is factually exact — he was arrested over a Gentile's right to be there.

He does not say he is suffering for them. He says he belongs to Christ, and that his position is theirs.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — A Sentence He Never Finishes

Something happens in verse 1 that is easy to miss and worth knowing.

Paul begins: For this reason I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus for you Gentiles — and then he stops. The sentence has no main verb. It never arrives.

He gets diverted into twelve verses about the mystery, and only in verse 14 does he start again: For this reason I bow my knees. That is where the sentence he began in verse 1 was going.

Which is now the third time in three chapters that this letter has broken its own grammar.

Chapter 1: a sentence of two hundred words that will not stop.
Chapter 2: an interruption to say by grace you have been saved three verses early.
Chapter 3: a sentence abandoned for thirteen verses.

And all three breakdowns have the same cause. Every time Paul starts to say something else, the grace gets in front of him.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — A Mystery Is Not a Puzzle

The word mystery has drifted, and the drift makes this chapter harder than it should be.

In English a mystery is something nobody has solved yet. In Paul's Greek, mystērion is something that was hidden and has now been told. The emphasis is not on the puzzle. It is on the disclosure.

Which is why Paul can do the one thing an English mystery never allows: he states the answer. Verse 6 tells you exactly what the mystery is, in plain words, with no riddle attached.

And the content is not what most people would guess. The mystery is not the Trinity, or the end of the world, or the identity of a beast. It is this: that Gentiles are in, on the same terms.

Which sits beside the word Le learned on day one hundred. Apocalipse — the removal of the covering. Verse 3 uses that very word: by revelation He made known to me the mystery. C'est par révélation. The cloth came off, and what was under it was a door standing open.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The First Invented Word

Now the thing worth having from this chapter. Verse 6 contains three words in Greek, and all three begin with the same prefix Paul has been reaching for all week — syn-, meaning together with.

Fellow heirs. Of the same body. Partakers together. The French keeps the first one visible: cohéritiers.

And the middle one, syssōma — literally same-bodied — is not found in Greek before Paul. He appears to have made it up.

Think about what that means. The language he was writing in had no word for what he was trying to say. Greek had words for allies, for guests, for converts, for resident foreigners, for people admitted on sufferance. It had no word for two ancient enemies sharing one body.

So he built one. The thing was new, and the vocabulary had to be enlarged to hold it — which is exactly what he said in the last chapter: one new man.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Second Invented Word

Two verses later he coins another one, and this time it is about himself.

To me, who am less than the least of all the saints. À moi, qui suis le moindre de tous les saints.

The Greek is elachistoterō — and it is not a real word either. Elachistos already means least, the superlative, the bottom. Paul then puts a comparative ending on it, which grammar does not permit: leaster. More least than the least.

So in the space of three verses, this man invents a word for how large the church is, and a word for how small he is.

And he is not performing humility. He is the man who cast his vote against the saints when they were put to death — he says so himself. When he calls himself less than the least of them, he has particular faces in mind.

Which is why the next clause matters: to me this grace was given. The smallness and the commission are in the same sentence, and the grace is what joins them.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Riches You Cannot Track

The unsearchable riches of Christ. The Greek word is anexichniastos, and it is a picture rather than an abstraction.

It is built on ichnos — a footprint, a track. The word means untrackable: riches whose trail cannot be followed to its source.

A hunter can follow a footprint back to the animal. A traveller can follow a river up to its spring. Paul says these riches have no trail that runs out. You may walk toward the source for as long as you like and never arrive at a wall.

Which is the same shape as Smith's picture on the sixth of August, and Le's own line about it. A store is drawn down by use. A fountain is not.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — The Angels Are Watching the Church

Verse 10 is one of the strangest sentences Paul ever wrote, and it should be read slowly.

To the intent that now the manifold wisdom of God might be made known BY THE CHURCH to the principalities and powers in the heavenly places.

The audience is not human. Paul says that God is teaching the unseen powers something — and the teaching aid is the church.

The word for manifold is polypoikilos: many-coloured, richly variegated, the word you would use of embroidery or a meadow in flower. The Segond has la sagesse infiniment variée de Dieu.

And the colour is the point. What is being displayed is Jew and Gentile in one body — the thing that had no word for it until Paul made one. The powers are being shown a wisdom they had not imagined, and the exhibit is a congregation of ordinary reconciled people.

Which means an unremarkable church, in an unremarkable town, is a lecture being delivered to the heavenly realms.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Boldness and Access

Verse 12 gathers three words together. In whom we have boldness and access with confidence through faith in Him.

Boldness is parrēsia — literally all-speech. In a Greek city it named the right of a free citizen to stand up in the assembly and say anything. A slave did not have it. A foreigner did not have it.

And access is prosagōgē — yesterday's word, one chapter later. The right of approach, being escorted in.

Put together: the right to be brought in, and the right to speak once there. La liberté de nous approcher de Dieu avec confiance.

Which completes the reversal that began with the wall. The barrier said: come no further, and say nothing. This verse says: you will be brought in, and you may speak freely.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — He Comforts Them About His Own Chains

And then the last verse of the paragraph, which is the most human line in it.

Therefore I ask that you do not lose heart at my tribulations for you, which is your glory.

He is in prison. They are free. And he is the one writing to reassure them.

He does not ask for sympathy, or for anything to be sent, or for petitions to be raised. He asks them not to be discouraged on his account — and then tells them his suffering is their glory, because it is the evidence that the door was really opened.

A man does not go to prison over a technicality nobody meant. The chains prove the wall came down.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Sou, Not Estou

Le read this verse in Portuguese, and Portuguese says something English cannot.

Sou o prisioneiro de Jesus Cristo. Not estou preso — which would make it a condition, temporary, a state being passed through. Ser is what a thing is.

Paul is not reporting his circumstances. He is giving his title.

And Le's phrase for him is the right one: judeu de carteirinha. He lists the credentials himself in Philippians 3 — circumcised the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, a Pharisee. Nobody's papers were more in order. And this is the man God sent to the people the papers were designed to exclude.

The sentence also has two words that reach a long way: por vós, os gentios. Le is one of them. A Brazilian woman reading a letter written to Greeks in Asia Minor, on the coast of Normandy, in the fourth language of her morning. It had to travel a very long way to arrive — and it was addressed to her when it was written.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — Prisoner and Free

Le says two things that sound opposed, and the New Testament holds both without flinching. Todo cristão é prisioneiro — and sou livre em Cristo.

She also names where the first word comes from: a percepção que o mundo tem do cristão. From outside, a life under Christ looks like restriction — a man in chains, a life full of refusals.

But Paul does not use the word that way. He does not say he is seen as a prisoner. He chooses the title himself, from inside the cell. And elsewhere he calls himself doulos — servant, bondman — in the opening line of letters where nobody made him.

So both stand, because the captivity and the freedom have the same owner. Which is Le's own discovery from August, in different words: He never offered a life without a yoke. He offered His.

And Psalm 116:16, which she read on the twenty-fourth of August, says both in one line. Sou teu servo... tu quebraste as minhas ligaduras. The bonds cut, the service continuing.

✦ Pastor Barnabas · Pastoral Note — O Pecado Não Tem Poder

Le adds a claim about herself, and it is not an overstatement — it is Paul's sentence, said to ordinary people.

Romans 6:14: o pecado não terá domínio sobre vós. Le péché n'aura point de pouvoir sur vous.

And the verb is worth having, because it is more honest than the English usually sounds. The Greek is kyrieuō — from kyrios, lord. It does not say sin disappears. It says sin stops being the master.

Present, and no longer in charge. Which is something a person can actually recognise in a real life.

And note that Paul writes this to a whole congregation in Rome, not to apostles. Le is right that she is not Paul. She is also right that the sentence was addressed to her.

She knows the difference between the two captivities because she has been in both — and said so in July, before any of this was read: estava cansada de vencer. That is a person describing the old master, and recognising the change of hands.