Religion Medici: Anger Management

In the older Western lectionary, the readings for the 19th Sunday after Pentecost are from Ephesians 4 and Matthew 22.  While both are fairly straightforward, a little attention to the details of language might clarify some aspects of these important texts, while also raising other questions.  I’ll take up the epistle today and later in the week have a crack at the more complex questions raised in Our Lord’s parable of the King’s wedding feast.

In Ephesians 4:22-27, Paul instructs Christian converts to live according to the faith.  He specifically cites the need to tell the truth, control anger, and work productively (rather than steal):

That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another. Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath: Neither give place to the devil.

This text is often cited by pacifists and people who wish to argue that all anger is always bad.  But Paul specifically says something like, “Go ahead and be angry without sin so long as you do not nurse that anger over night.  More significant, perhaps, are two words that define the context:  members and neighbor.

In telling Christians they are members of one another, he is reminding them they are part of a Christian community rooted in love of God, obedience to his word, and worship of his Son.  Not only are they not strangers or hostile foreigners, they belong to an extended family of faith.

With neighbor, we are back to a confusion to which I have drawn attention many times, e.g., in a discussion of the parable of the Good Samaritan.  The Hebrew, Greek, and Latin texts of Scripture distinguish between a literal neighbor—someone who lives nearby—from a Jewish ethical term that denotes those to whom we are morally responsible.  For early Jews, such people were, starting at the top and going down, members of the family, more distant kinfolk, members of the same tribe, and ultimately all Jews but no one else.  In the New Testament, the term is applied to the faithful.  

So Paul’s admonition is not universal.  First, it is all right to get angry with a member of the family or the congregation, so long as one is prepared to give it up (and presumably seek a peaceful resolution).  Second, it applies only to fellow-Christians and not to enemies of the Faith.  I am not suggesting that he has given carte blanche to hate and harm Muslims or pagans, but only that this specific passage concerns only Christians.

These Religio Medici pieces were started long ago on another website.  The title, of course, is a play on the title of Thomas Browne’s Religion Medici (A Doctor’s Religion), a masterpiece of humane and intelligent discourse.  I cannot hope to equal either the beauty of Browne’s prose, but as a philologist (hence my title) I take an interest in the literal, prosaic meaning of the Greek text of the New Testament, and, incidentally, of the oldest complete version of the Old Testament—the version generally used in the New Testament—the Greek Septuagint.  I have no wish to pose as a theologian or expert on the text of the Scriptures, but I do believe that a straightforward, non-technical reading of the Greek text may help us, at least, to understand what the first readers of the Gospels and perhaps even a bit of what Our Lord’s followers thought they were hearing.