English
17 February 2010
Here’s a quotation from Paul’s letter to the Romans:
. . . whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood . . .
Romans 3:25a KJV
What does the word propitiation mean? That’s a question many would be hard pressed to answer.
How’s this rendering?
God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement, through the shedding of his blood—to be received by faith.
Romans 3:25a TNIV
This appears to make things a little clearer, provided one knows what atonement means.
Translations like the NIV have taken some flak for using the less traditional rendering sacrifice of atonement. The reason given is that propitiation implies that Christ’s sacrifice appeased God’s righteous anger, and that the other two renderings obscure this. However, I propose three reasons why sacrifice of atonement this is actually a better rendering.
First, it is debatable whether appeasement is even implied by the Greek word in this verse. Some translations therefore use expiation (RSV; see also NEB). The NIV rendering leaves both options open—it doesn’t, in my opinion, obscure either interpretation.
Second, given that appeasement is implied by the Greek, the word propitiation has no meaning for most people. It is not plain English. It is not even high-level English; it is a special theological term. Its meaning can be learnt, I suppose, from a dictionary. But all Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary gives for the word is:
1 : the act of propitiating 2 : something that propitiates; specif : an atoning sacrifice
So even after looking up the word, one gets no more meaning out of the word than one would the NIV rendering.
Furthermore, the 1984 NIV footnote reads ‘Or as the one who would turn aside his wrath, taking away sin’. This implies the concept of appeasement even more clearly than the term propitiation.
Third, the word propitiation obscures the reference of the Greek to the atonement cover (traditionally ‘mercy seat’) described in Leviticus. The Greek word used in Romans 3:25 is the same as the one used in the Greek translation (Septuagint) in Leviticus 16:15. Similarly, the NIV wording ‘atonement’ appears in both places. The 2005 TNIV footnote says, “The Greek for sacrifice of atonement refers to the atonement cover on the ark of the covenant (see Lev. 16:15,16).” The NET Bible even puts this in the text itself: “God publicly displayed him at his death as the mercy seat accessible through faith.”
The ESV, on the other hand, uses the word propitiation without so much as a footnote. For a translation that puts so much stress on concordance (that is, using the same word in the translation for the same word in the original as much as possible), this is strange.
One last comment. Some people do not know the word atonement either. These renderings are also good:
- For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. (NLT)
- God sent Christ to be our sacrifice. Christ offered his life’s blood, so that by faith in him we could come to God. (CEV)
- God offered him, so that by his blood he should become the means by which people’s sins are forgiven through their faith in him. (GNB)
- God sent him to die in our place to take away our sins. We receive forgiveness through faith in the blood of Jesus’ death. (NCV)
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