Was Paul a Jailbird? A Response to the Response -- By: Ben Witherington III
Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 61:3 (Sep 2018)
Article: Was Paul a Jailbird? A Response to the Response
Author: Ben Witherington III
JETS 61:3 (September 2018) p. 559
Was Paul a Jailbird? A Response to the Response
* Ben Witherington III is Jean R. Amos Professor of NT for Doctoral Studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, 204 N. Lexington Ave., Wilmore, KY 40390. He may be contacted at [email protected].
I note with interest the recent response to my article. It seems we had best go back to linguistic basics for a moment. Let’s start with the Greek word δεσμός. This word literally means chain, bond, a string or ligament, or some other kind of impediment that hinders a person. What the word does not mean, in the first instance, is prison, or jail. Hence the translation “prisoner” is not necessary, or really very accurate. There is, however, a related word, δέσμιος, which means “one who is bound,” and sometimes by extension that means a “prisoner,” but even that does not necessarily mean one is in prison. It can mean one is under house arrest, chained to someone, or in some way detained by authorities.
This brings me to Acts 28.16, where we hear that Paul was chained to a person but was under house arrest. This, I submit, is the condition of Paul when he wrote Philemon, Philippians, Colossians, and Ephesians (assuming Paul is responsible for these four documents). They should be called the Captivity Epistles, not the Prison Epistles, unlike, say, 2 Timothy where Paul seems more clearly incarcerated. Notice how many translations render Col 4:18 quite rightly as “remember my chains” but insist on translating δεσμός elsewhere as referring to imprisonment. A little more consistency would be helpful from translators! Ephesians 4:1 is the place where we find the word δέσμιος, but notice Paul says he is a “prisoner of Christ,” or better, “in bonds because of Christ.” He does not say he is a prisoner of Rome or Ephesus or anywhere else.
In my recent article, published last fall in JETS,1 I made clear that there is no positive case to be made for Paul being a prisoner in Ephesus. Here I am pointing out what I did not say there, namely that lexically there is no reason to interpret the Greek words mentioned above to mean anything other than that Paul was in chains, as Acts 28 says explicitly.
Another term is of interest, a very different term. Students of Paul’s Greek have long noted his penchant for creating or using compound nouns beginning with the prefix syn (“with,” or �...
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