My absentee
ballot for the US elections will be arriving soon, which of course means my
thoughts are drifting once more to my homeland, the proverbial “land of the
free.”
But what is freedom? More important, what is freedom from the perspective of a follower of Jesus, who proclaimed “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36)?
With both major
political parties in the U.S. laying claim to the term “freedom,” this seems
like the right month for a word study: eleutheria, the Greek word used
in the New Testament for “freedom” or “liberty.”
EPHESUS BEFORE JESUS
In pagan Greece,
one deity laid claim to the title of “freedom”: Artemis Eleutheria,
goddess of the hunt and of liberty. From
my point of view as an ex-pat American, Eleutheria is interesting because she
was the goddess on whom the Statue of Liberty was modeled. Her Latin name, when she’s broken off from
Artemis as a standalone goddess, was Libertas. From my viewpoint as a Christian, my ears
perk up at the Artemis side of her identity.
That’s because of Acts chapter 19.
Stroll along with
me as I give you a little more backstory.
The goddess
Artemis was a favorite throughout the cities of the Greek world, believed to be
the sister of the god Apollo and mistress of the hunt. In the city of Myra (in what is modern-day Turkey), she was worshipped exclusively
under the name of Artemis Eleutheria, adding freedom to her many epithets. However, several hours up the Asia Minor coast in the
city of Ephesus … you know this ancient city thanks to the epistle that Paul
wrote to the church there … Artemis had been raised to an even more exalted
status. There, she was also a fertility
goddess, the divine being who granted women pregnancy. The Ephesian temple built in her honor was on
the grounds where, it was said, her image had “fallen from heaven” (Acts
19:35). That temple, destroyed and
rebuilt several times over the centuries, is considered one of the Seven
Wonders of the Ancient World.
When your city's principal pagan goddess is all about childbirth, those who have children rise
in status. And if you can’t have babies
(since there’s no IVF technology for another two thousand years), what better
way to up your chances of status than by using magic … specifically, small
silver statues of the goddess to increase your odds of getting pregnant? A little home shrine, some incense burning, a
small sacrifice or two … it was all worth it to gain the status of having
children in Ephesus. It meant Artemis
Eleutheria was on your side.
But then this guy
named Paul shows up and starts talking about eleutheria, freedom,
through a new deity you hadn’t heard of before.
He starts pushing ideas about a second birth, ideas that can make
you, yourself, into a child of his God, and maybe even bring along your whole
family for the eternal ride.
If you’re a common
citizen of Ephesus, you’re intrigued and might wish to learn more. But if you’re a rich idol-builder who makes bank
off those silver statues of Artemis, you’re not one bit happy. This new religion threatens your income. You need to do something. You need to address the crowds and stir up
their anger by making them feel that their way of life is being
threatened. You need to get them to
storm the center of the city in an enraged, anti-Paul riot.
The rich guy
whipping up this civic insurrection was named Demetrius, and his story in Acts
19 makes clear that he cared far more about his wealth than he did about
families having children. Neither the
pagan goddess Artemis nor this newcomer God called Jesus defined his eleutheria. His freedom was built on his profiteering,
and it was worth inciting a riot at the heart of his city-state to keep his
pockets lined. He staged that riot in
the Great Theater of Ephesus, right up the street from the palace, the Ephesian
center of government.
EPHESUS WITH JESUS
Paul escaped the uprising. He’d wanted to address the rioting mob, but
his own companions and friendly local officials talked him down. Over the years, the church took root in
Ephesus, that land dedicated to Artemis. And it came to pass that Paul saw fit to
address an epistle to the young church there.
Wait. There’s an issue: How hard does Paul push the
“become children of God” idea to former worshippers of a pregnancy-enabling goddess? And how intensely does he drive the eleutheria
concept of “freedom by salvation” to erstwhile devotees of Artemis Eleutheria? His audience is mostly believers, of course,
but some old ideas can linger just below the surface, waiting to reemerge.
Paul decides that
he has to conquer those pre-existing biases.
He’ll do it via a method he mentioned to believers in Corinth: “Take
every thought captive for Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5, which many Bible scholars
feel was written in Ephesus itself). Paul
decides to take ownership of the child-bearing concept in the very first
sentences of his greeting to the Ephesians (1:5). He declares himself and them to be huiothesia,
the adopted sons and daughters of God.
But doesn’t
adoption imply lower status than children by natural childbirth? Not at all.
It turns out Paul has decided to use a legal term here. Huiothesia , according to distinct research papers by scholars G.F. Hawthorne, P. Miller, and J. Smith, is a Greek word tied to
Roman law. It indicates the designation
of a non-related person as family, child, and rightful heir to all properties
of the adopting party. It’s a higher
status than a second son, higher than a second daughter. Legally, officially, it’s equal status to the
firstborn and head of household. Roma
locuta, causa finita, one might say.
Here’s the rhetorical
punch Paul is throwing: “Sure, Artemis gave you social status through your childbearing;
but Christ offers you status as the stepchild, the adopted child, the firstborn
of a real God, and of the only real God, at that. Human children are great, but nothing’s
superior to being step-familied in through legal huiothesia. Those are the true children of heaven.”
Immediately, Paul
continues his “capturing thoughts for Christ” by hinting at the concept of
freedom. He doesn’t use the word eleutheria
yet. He uses variations of the Greek charitos
throughout verses 6 and 7. That word
contains the idea of gifts and free grace, with Paul praising God for the “gift
He has gifted us” or “the grace with which He's graced us.” He’s dangling the freedom idea without mentioning it directly. After all, how
much does a recipient pay for gifts he gets?
How much work did a graced believer trade for the grace he received? Nothing and none.
It’s without cost and priceless, all at once. It’s hints of eleutheria without the
Artemis baggage.
Paul’s not done
yet with his subtle undermining of the Acts 19 riot and its rich, greedy
perpetrators. He reminds his Ephesian
readers that they are sealed with the Holy Spirit as a pledge against the day
of their full inheritance in God (v. 14).
Paul here opts to refer to the Holy Spirit as an arrabon. That Greek word is usually translated as “a
guarantee” or “a pledge” in English Bible versions, but arrabon is a
technical term found throughout the ancient Greek world in financial and
business documents. It is a “downpayment.” That’s not a modernization of the term;
Greeks and Romans had literal downpayment systems much like our own. It wouldn’t be far off, in fact, to translate
a portion of this verse as, “the promised Spirit, our layaway plan.”
The next idea Paul
takes captive for Christ is the concept of riches. In the second chapter of Ephesians, he
celebrates (v. 4-8) how amazingly rich believers are because God Himself is
rich (in mercy), providing incomparable riches (of grace) and handing out the
best free gift (charitos, again) of eternal life to those children born
a second time through faith. So, chew on that, you silver-crafting,
money-lusting instigators of riots in Ephesus’s own capital neighborhood.
Paul spends the
entirety of his letter celebrating freedom in Christ without actually using the
term eleutheria (wait for it, though). He shares the wisdom of the Gospel, a mystery
revealed first to the Apostles and then to the Ephesians. It’s no coincidence that Athena, the sister
of Artemis, was worshipped in so-called “mystery cults” as the goddess of
wisdom. Paul knows this, and claims more ground for Christ by capturing mystery
and wisdom as well. In verse 12 of
chapter 3, Paul wields the Greek term for using “free speech” when approaching
God: parresian, usually translated “boldness” but literally meaning
“all-speech,” that is, speaking freely.
Then, likely
recalling the civic riots his first preaching mission preceded, Paul urges
believers to put away “rage, anger, brawling, and slander” (4:31), embracing
compassion toward their neighbors as the Christian way. Peace, calm, and gentleness are the tools of
the believer; shouts, demands, and verbal assaults are the weapons of unbelievers,
whom Ephesians should treat with a mind and manner like Christ’s. They’re safe from unbelievers’ assaults,
after all. They have the armor of God.
AND THEN THERE’S SLAVERY
Finally, in the
closing portion of the letter, Paul hits the Ephesian church with that loaded term, the Greek
word that was part of the name of their former goddess of freedom, eleutheria.
He’s been subtle
about it up to now. But Paul jolts his
readers into appreciating eleutheria fully by countering it with the
Greek term for its very opposite: doulos.
Paul never shied
from the term doulos, “slave,” in any of his writings, using it
liberally in his letters to the Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, Colossians, and
more. But here, in an epistle to the
land of Lady Liberty herself, Artemis Eleutheria, he saves it until the end. Early in the letter he even steps away from
his common self-designation as a "slave" of Christ by calling himself a diakonos,
a deacon-servant of Christ. It’s as if
he’s holding back, saving the doulos for impact.
By the way, doulos
really does mean “slave.” Any
translation or minister who claims the meaning of the word is “servant” is
being misleading. When Mary prays, as
some translations put it, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord” (Luke 1:38), she is actually
saying, “Look here at God’s slave girl [doula].” When Paul says in Romans 6:20 that we were
once douloi of sin, he means we were sin’s very slaves, not simply
servants bringing it refreshments at poolside when summoned. The douloi were human beings owned by
their human masters, not low-ranking employees going home at the end of the
day. Therefore, beware when your
English-language Bible says “servant,” because you don’t know whether its
original word was diakonos, an actual servant employee, or doulos,
a human being owned by another.
One more “by-the-way”:
Don’t fall for it when a preacher tells you slavery was different in those days
and slaves were treated better than they were during the world’s colonial
era. Some orators claim this is true and
support it by pointing at ancient rules, biblical and nonbiblical, about how
slaves needed to be treated well. Rules
are not reality, and rules are put in place because there’s a need for them,
not because everyone’s already complying with unwritten versions of them. Otherwise, one could point at any country and
claim there are no murders there because they have a rule against murders. Not likely, my friends.
Okay, back to
Paul and Ephesians:
In closing, Paul
starts giving out marching orders. Kids,
he says, obey your parents. And you
parents, don’t exasperate your kids. And
hey, you slaves? (“Wait, what? Slaves, here in freedom land?”) Yeah, you slaves, here’s some
direction – obey your flesh masters, not just with eyeball-slavery when
they’re looking, but as if you were Christ’s slaves …. because you
are. You’re to do goodwill slaving
for God, not as if you were doing it for humans.
Paul hits them
here with every form of the word “slave” he can fit in. And yes, Greek has a word for
eyeball-slaving: ophthalmodoulian (say that ten times fast),
requiring most translations of verse 6:6 to stretch out the English into some
version of “not just pleasing them when they’re looking.”
I can imagine
early readers or listeners of the epistle wondering why they’re suddenly being
barraged with the “slave” word in every clause when it hadn’t been used at all
until now. Then it hits them – Paul
says, “You know you’ll be rewarded by the Lord for every good deed, even if you
are a slave. Or even if you’re …
free.” It’s Paul’s one and only use of
the most common word for “free” in his epistle to the land of Artemis. He reminds them, one and all, slave and
owner, that they’re no longer the property of a goddess of fertility, freedom,
and the hunt. They are children born of
God, His adopted stepkids, given legal family status and true eleutheria
in the kingdom of God.
ELEUTHERIA
Ancient Greek has
a number of words tied to freedom. Some
can be found in scripture, like parrema (freedom of speech, plain
speaking) and eremia (freedom from loneliness, interestingly used in
scripture only as a geographic term, the desert).
Other Greek words
tied to freedom never make it into the New Testament, like adeia
(freedom from pain) and autexousios (free will).
By far, though, the
New Testament’s preferred word for freedom is eleutheria in its various
forms. When you see the word “free” in
your Bible, it’s very likely a translation of that.
Allow me to turn
a little sociological for a moment. As
an American, I’ve been culturally trained to see “freedom” from one angle: “freedom
TO.” I have freedom to use speech,
freedom to assemble, freedom to bear arms, freedom to petition the government
when I think they’re wrong about something.
True, I have freedoms FROM some things like unreasonable searches, but
my Constitution even phrases that as a freedom TO – “the right of the people to
be secure in their persons.” I point
this out because the more I study the word eleutheria, the less it seems
to be about my individual freedom to do things. I think scripture uses it more as a freedom
FROM idea.
It’s less a
matter of “I am free,” more a matter of “I am freed.” To me, that seems the more Christian approach
to the word. It’s not that I have
liberty; it’s that I’ve been liberated.
As examples:
- In 1 Corinthians 10:29, I’m told I’m freed from the dietary
restrictions of the old Law … but I shouldn’t scandalize others with my
freedom, since I’m not seeking my own good, but the good of others.
- In Galatians 2,
I learn that Titus has been freed from expectations that he be circumcised, and
he’s spared the demands of those who snuck into Paul’s group to spy on their eleutherian
in Christ in order to re-doulos them.
- Galatians 5,
perhaps the most powerful part of scripture dealing with freedom in Christ, declares
me freed from the flesh … but then invited to make myself,
through love, a doula to my fellow believers.
- 1 Peter 2:16
charges me not to use my eleutheria as an excuse to sin, but to do good
as an example and to show myself as a doula of God … freed to get into
the right kind of “slavery,” total ownership by the Lord.
- 2 Corinthians
3:17 declares me freed from all the Law, even claiming that the eleutheria
I live in is God shining through me, something the Law could never do.
- James 2:12
declares me freed from being judged and from judging others, since the perfect law
that gives me eleutheria functions on mercy, not judgment.
- Romans 8:21 caps off my reflections by assuring me that the whole physical world will, in the end, share in the eleutheria of the children of God, freed from its doulos status of decay. Talk about reversing entropy!
In other words,
the root of freedom as used in biblical Greek is not the idea of individual
rights, but of belonging. I’m not a
slave, I’m one of the freed citizens. I’m
not on my own; I’m in the body. I’m not
a hermit; I’m a freewoman in the Collective of Christ. Sure, I have individual rights, but I have to
think of the others who might be affected by my behaviors, my actions, my
freedoms. That’s what this word means,
and it’s what Paul spells out for the Ephesians. It’s what Paul spells out for you and me.
When I fill in my
absentee ballot to vote this year, that’s the kind of freedom I’ll be
considering when I make my choices.
Maran Atha,
YoYo Rez / Cosmic Parx
