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Ekklésia: “Church” or Called-out Ones?
This chapter endeavors in part to demonstrate that the word “church” cannot refer to living, earthly members of the kingdom of God. First, in Acts 19:37 the phrase “robbers of churches” (King James Bible) is mistranslated from the Greek word hierosulous. The root of hierosulous, hiero, signifies a sacred place, a sanctuary of a temple, or a temple. The longer passage of Acts 19:1-20:1 refers to the temple of Artemis in the city Ephesus in Asia Minor (now Turkey), and thus the correct translation in Acts 19:37 of hierosulous is “robbers of temples.”
Except in Acts 19:37 every other occurrence of the word “church” or “churches” in English-language Bibles is mistranslated from the Greek word ekklésia or a form thereof. Ekklésia is a composite word combined from ek, meaning “out,” and a derivation of kaleo, meaning “to call.” The correct English translation of ekklésia is “called-out ones,” and, for instance, in 2 Corinthians 6:17, the people whom the Lord calls out (“come out from among them and be ye separate”) are the called-out ones, a term and entity synonymous to the true disciples of Christ, or New Testament saints.
Thus, what English translations of the Greek New Testament refer to as “the church” in ancient Corinth, for example, are the disciples of Christ who were dwelling in ancient Corinth. The concept ekklésia does not refer to a material structure, a legal entity, or a religious corporation in ancient Corinth.
The occurrence of ekklésia in reference to Laodicea (Rev 3:14), however, would either present a paradox or could only be figurative if the congregation were wholly apostate. Here is where another Greek word, such as kuriakon (see below), might have done in place of ekklésia.
Why the mistranslation of “church” from ekklésia occurred in the Authorized Version is known from the translation rules which King James decreed to his Bible translators; specifically, rule number three: “The Old Ecclesiastical Words to be kept, viz., the Word Church not to be translated Congregation &c.”
Some scholars have proposed that the word “church” was derived from the Greek word kuriakon, which occurs in 1 Corinthians 11:20 and is translated “of the Lord,” and kuriaké, occurring in Revelation 1:10 and translated “Lord’s,” but philologically this is untenable. (These are the only two occurrences of the word used genitively.) The chief objection to this derivation of “church” is that the Greek word from which “church” is translated is, as described above, ekklésia, and this is the etymological root which passed into Latin (hence “ecclesiastical”) and all the Romanic and Celtic languages.
Nevertheless, there is general agreement among scholars in referring to kuriakon as being a name of the Christian house of worship, a signification which occurred first in the third century. Semiotically, however, the word “church” cannot refer to living, earthly members of the kingdom of God.
John 4:21-24 provides a hint of the difficulty that “church-goers” face (Jesus speaking to a Samaritan woman):
“The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. . . . But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.”
Jesus prophesied a new phenomenon of worship which is the very opposite to what the tradition of churchmen (cf. Col 2:8) has promulgated throughout most of the more than 1,900 years since Jesus' death and resurrection.
Also contrary to what the tradition of churchmen has propounded over the centuries, Jesus — not Peter — is the Rock upon which he established his body of New Testament worshippers. Matthew 16:18 records Jesus saying to Peter, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church [body of called-out ones].” In Matthew 16:18, “Peter” is translated from the Greek word petros, which is like a pebble that has eroded off a boulder or one of many pebbles into which a boulder has been smashed; and “rock” is translated from petra, which is a large rock, such as a boulder. Furthermore, when Jesus said “and upon this rock” he was not referring to Peter, because he was speaking to Peter, and by Jesus’ use of the definite adjective tauté té (“this”) — and because it is extremely doubtful that Jesus was pointing to a boulder — he was referring to himself as the Rock. Obviously, when Jesus said that he would build his ekklésian he was not referring to a material structure.
In reference again to John 4:21-24, prior to Jesus’ death and the spilling of his blood, the worshipping of YHWH had been centralized in the temple at Jerusalem, pursuant to the law of Moses. (The Samaritans had built a rival temple on Mount Gerizim, which is the reference of “this mountain” in John 4:21.) Upon Jesus’ death, the rending of the veil to the holy place inside the temple symbolically and concretely decentralized worship of YHWH for the members of God’s kingdom. Forty years later, the total physical destruction of the temple by the Romans not only decentralized the worship of YHWH but dissolved both the religion and the ethnicity, or ethnic significance, of the Israelites — which raises the questions (though beyond the scope of this chapter) of whether the term “Jew” refers specifically to an inhabitant of pre-A.D. 70 Judaea and whether the term “Jewish” refers specifically to adherents to the post-A.D. 70 version of the religion of the pre-A.D. 70 Judaeans.
In concordance with John 4:21-24, Acts 17:14 records Paul as saying, “God . . . dwelleth not in temples made with hands.” In this passage the word “temples” is translated from the Greek word naois, which signifies a material structure such as a building. Whereas the doctrines of some religious organizations dictate that the only place where their members must pray, for example, is inside a specific material structure, Acts 17:14 expounds that a naois embodies no spiritual significance and along with John 4:21-24 establishes that the assembling together inside a specifically designated material structure such as a “church building” contradicts the decentralization of the worship of God by acting to reinstitute the Old Covenant Jerusalem-temple model of the worship of God.