Citizenship

“Citizens”…

So what does come next? Now we get to dig… The text on the screen is the NLT “27 Above all, you must live as citizens of heaven, conducting yourselves in a manner worthy of the Good News about Christ.” (Phil 1:27a, NLT). This is the translation we use in our pews, but most of you probably own and use the NIV most often. Let’s look at it: “27 Whatever happens, conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” (Phil 1:27a, NIV). What do you see? Anything different?? Any phrases present in one translation and not in another???

Hmmm. So here is what I do in situations like this: first, I look for a footnote in my Bible – those often have explanations about what is going on, but here there aren’t any. So then I start looking at other English translations – most of them follow the NIV. Now I’m curious about why the NLT would add all this stuff about “live as citizens of heaven”, so I use the training I got at seminary to use tools freely available to everyone to look at the original verse as written by Paul in Greek. I use “blueletterbible.org” in my study, enter the verse reference, and then can see the original Greek (demonstrate). Now, I can’t read Greek, but the tools help me with that also, and what we find out is that Paul uses a word in here, politeuomai, which is the source of the problem. I learn it is an unusual word, only used twice in the New Testament, and I also discover it is the verb. Now, the NIV and other (generally older) translators just read the verb as describing how we should live: “conduct yourselves…” and leave it at that, but I’m suspicious there is more to it when I click on the definition provided by blueletterbible.org:

1) to be a citizen

2) to administer civil affairs, manage the state

3) to make or create a citizen

a) to be a citizen

b) to behave as a citizen

1) to avail one's self of or recognise the laws

2) to conduct one's self as pledged to some law of life

Then, my next step is to read the commentaries – commentaries are academic books written by scholars who really know Greek, who really know the Bible, and who often also know a lot about other things that were written at the time and so can compare how words are used in other places to try and understand what they mean. Many of these will write their own translations of the passage, and all of the academic commentaries I read included the ideas present in our NLT. Reading further, I discovered a whole big academic conversation about how Paul really did mean a whole lot more than we find in the NIV and other translations, and it is rooted in this idea of “citizenship” which is in that Greek verb I mentioned earlier. This is a newer conversation, and we see the results beginning to work into the newer translations (like NLT, and in TNIV which is “Today’s New International Version”, a fairly recent update to the NIV (2001) which makes Phil. 1:27, “Whatever happens, as citizens of heaven live in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”