Addendum on Romans 5:11, atonement and reconciliation

Earlier today I posted the fifth installment of Them Five Dollar Bible Words. Today’s word was reconciliation. One of the verses I looked at was Romans 5:11

And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement.

This is what I said:

“I’m not sure why the KJV translated this as atonement, because it is the word reconciliation. Although I remember Derek Prince explaining that the word atonement is best understood as at-one-ment. I like that! That is reconciliation.”

This is one of those times when you say or write something and fail to listen to the little voice in your head. You see, I know that the KJV translators had a tendency to use a variety of words when the same Greek word occurs multiple times close together. I was also aware they had done this earlier in Romans 5. In verses 2, 3, and 11 Paul uses the same Greek word, yet the KJV translators use three different English words. They do the same thing in verses 10 and 11 where the word for reconciliation occurs three times, in keeping with their practice they translated it “atonement” the third time.

This afternoon I was reading an entry in Richard Chenevix Trench’s Synonyms of the New Testament. He said,

“the word ‘atonement,’ by which our Translators have once rendered katallage [reconciliation] (Rom. v. 11), has little by little shifted its meaning. It has done this so effectually, that were the translation now for the first time to be made, and words to be employed in their present sense and not in their past, ‘atonement’ would plainly be a much fitter rendering of ilasmo [propitiation], the notion of propitiation, which we shall find the central one of ilasmo, always lying in ‘atonement’ as we use it now. It was not so once. When our Translation was made, it signified, as innumerable examples prove, reconciliation, or the making up of a foregoing enmity; all its uses in our early literature justifying the etymology now sometimes called into question, that ‘atonement’ is ‘at-one-ment,’ and therefore = ‘reconciliation’: and that consequently it was then, although not now, the proper rendering of katallage.”

You see, I didn’t know that earlier! But, if you will re-read my comment, I still got it right!!