Editor’s note: This article is a 2024 CBE Writing Contest grand prize winner. Enjoy!
I still remember—albeit somewhat vaguely—being woken up by my father in the early morning hours of July 21, 1969. Peering sleepily at a grainy video signal on our black and white TV, I joined the approximately 500 million others who watched Neil Armstrong become the first human being to set foot on the moon. As he stepped off one of the lunar module’s landing pads onto the powdery surface, he uttered the now-immortal words, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Why the square brackets in that sentence, you ask? This seemingly insignificant addition found in most printed versions reveals the difference between what was broadcast, recorded, and first reported,1 and what Armstrong intended to say, or—as Armstrong himself maintains—what he did say. Some suggest the “a” was obscured by static or merged with “for” in his natural North American Midwest accent.2 Cynics would point to an administrative fudge, attempting to cover up for him forgetting his lines at that crucial moment (though who can blame him if that were the case!).
The debate has gone on for decades, but what difference does it make? And what’s it got to do with theology anyway?
Man, or A Man?
Simply put, there is a world of difference between “a man,” referring to an individual male human being, and “man” when used as a synonym of “mankind,” spoken by Armstrong a few words later in the same sentence.3
To a large extent, language contributes to the way we think about the world around us. The widespread and continuous usage in English of “man” when referring to all human beings has, perhaps unwittingly, contributed to patriarchal thinking in many areas of life. But its use in Bible translations, and its constant presence in Christian speech and culture, has obscured what Scripture says, emphasising maleness to the detriment of women in theological thinking and church life. Many more in-depth studies on this phenomenon are available,4 but a few examples will help to illustrate the issue and hopefully guide us in our choice of words in church.
But first, we need to learn to distinguish between a couple of Greek words. The New Testament uses two different words that have regularly been translated in English Bibles as “man”: ἀνήρ (aner) and ἄνθρωπος (anthropos).5 Whilst appearing to be synonymous, they are different in scope, a distinction that is obscured by many English translations. In New Testament Greek, other than for a few specific occasions, anthropos simply means, “a person of either sex, with a focus on participation in the human race, a human being.”6 Aner, on the other hand (except in the book of James) refers not to people in general but to, “an adult human male, man, husband.”7 Greek thus contrasts with English usage, though the same lexical pattern can be observed in German, as illustrated below:
The numerous English Bibles that uncritically translate anthropos as “man” fail to reflect the original; inevitably, this imprecision impacts our understanding of Scripture.
One Mediator
The text referred to in the title, 1 Timothy 2:5, is translated in the NIV as: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind (anthropos), the man (anthropos) Christ Jesus.” In the original Greek, God’s work of redemption in Christ focuses on Jesus’s participation in our human nature, not his gender. Yet the English presentation in this pivotal phrase of Jesus as man has rooted in our collective Christian psyche an inappropriate attachment to Jesus as our male Saviour, rather than Jesus, our human Saviour. Compare this translation with TNIV: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and human beings, Christ Jesus, himself human.” By cutting out the unnecessary gendered meaning of “man,” Jesus’s identification with all humanity is much more apparent.
In Human Likeness
Philippians 2:6–8 is key to understanding Jesus’s incarnation: “. . . [Jesus] made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human (anthropos) likeness” (NIV), then continuing: “And being found in appearance as a man (anthropos)…” Why the change from “human” to “man”? The first usage is plural (“persons,” or “people”), but that does not warrant the gendered translation that follows. In coming to this world, “the Word became flesh” (John 1:14, NIV), and gender is irrelevant. NLT’s “…born as a human being. When he appeared in human form…” maintains the contextual continuity and avoids speculation about the importance—or necessity, according to some—of Jesus’s male identity.
Son of Man
It seems that Jesus himself also wished to emphasize his humanity with his constant use of the somewhat enigmatic phrase ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ ἀνθρώπου (ho huios tou anthrōpou [literally “the child of the human”]) to refer to himself.8 Used over eighty times in the Gospels—every time except one on Jesus’s own lips—it no doubt carries messianic overtones but must also be read as a simple profession of his own humanity.9 God’s Messiah is no Rambo-style invincible conqueror but a vulnerable human being who, in apparent weakness and dependence on God, brings God’s kingdom to all humanity.
Almost universally translated—and capitalized—in our Bibles as “Son of Man,” this gendered title again masks the wider intention of the original. Whilst the weakness of this traditional rendering is acknowledged, the phrase is so firmly cemented in Christian tradition that attempts to better reflect the Greek, such as CEB’s “the Human One,” gain little acceptance. There are good reasons to accept the status quo, but it is then essential that its relevance to women is deliberately called out: in Jesus’s preferred way of referring to himself, he is self-consciously human more than male.
“Other Men”
Whilst there has been movement in modern translations and revisions towards more inclusive language, let’s briefly consider a few other notable translations of anthropos in the New Testament that continue to reinforce male-centred theology and male-dominated Christianity.
Matthew 4:4 (NIV) reads:
Jesus answered: “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone,
but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Of the 60 (!) English translations listed on biblegateway.com, 43 retain “man”.10 Why can a translation that claims accuracy and faithfulness to the original not use “people” or “human beings”? Is “People do not live by bread alone” (NLT) not preferable?
Matthew 8:27 (NIV) records Jesus in a boat with “his disciples” calming a storm on Lake Galilee:
The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this?
Even the winds and the waves obey him!”
Reinforcing an erroneous but deeply ingrained picture of Jesus’s disciples as all male, I find this translation deeply problematic. From the parallel passage beginning in Luke 8:22, we know that Jesus at this point already had women disciples: “The Twelve were with him, and also some women . . .” (Luke 8:1–2). So why do the translators assume that there were only men with him in the boat? Or perhaps this is in fact a discreet nod to the female disciples who were with him, suggesting that they knew Jesus so much better than the men and were not surprised by his action!
Additionally, I suspect that the translators were unduly influenced by the Authorized Version’s “What manner of man is this!”, supplying a noun which is absent in the Greek. “Who on earth is this?” more accurately reflects the original Greek of the disciples’ exclamation, which is an expression of their amazement at Jesus’s authority over the natural world.
Finally, Mark 2:27 (NIV):
Then [Jesus] said to them: “The Sabbath was made for man,
not man for the Sabbath.”
Again, why are the translators resistant to the simpler and clearer, “The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath”? Perhaps they are unwilling to break the connection with traditional wording that flows more easily off the tongue of those steeped in Christian culture. But is that a reason to continue with an inaccurate version that reinforces the exclusion of women?
One Giant Leap . . .
Taking due care to express the nuance of the original Greek and not inject unnecessary male-preferring interpretation into the translation of anthropos would be one small step. But perhaps that may help us as a church to make the giant leap of eradicating the male bias that still plagues our thinking, communication, and action.
- If you want to listen to the recording for yourself, it’s available here: https://www.lintech.org/moon/.
- See https://theconversation.com/was-neil-armstrong-misquoted-study-suggests-his-accent-couldve-been-to-blame-59093.
- Although the accepted meaning of mankind generally refers to “the human race : the totality of human beings”; it does also hold the archaic meaning of “men especially as distinguished from women” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mankind). As “mankind” only serves to perpetuate the identification of the whole human race with its male representatives, I prefer “humanity”.
- See, for example, these academic articles available at CBE: https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/incarnation-trinity-and-ordination-women-priesthood/; https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/setting-record-straight/; https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/what-about-gender-accurate-tniv/
- For a straightforward overview of their usage in the New Testament, see Matthew Ferris’s article at https://gentlemantheologian.com/2021/07/29/new-testament-use-aner-anthropos-synonymously/. For exploration of their wider usage in classical Greek, see ἄνθρωπος and ἀνήρ in Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ), available at https://lsj.gr/wiki/Main_Page or in The Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, & Diggle, J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.
- Walter Bauer et al., A Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament, and other early Christian literature (BDAG), ἄνθρωπος, available at https://archive.org/details/greekenglishlexi0000baue_i7v3/. Anthropology, the study of human society, is derived from anthropos.
- ibid. ἀνήρ. Androcentric, dominated by or emphasizing male interests, is derived from aner. For the one instance in the New Testament where aner in the plural ostensibly refers to a mixed group, see Acts 17:34.
- Whilst huios can refer specifically to male offspring, it regularly includes both male and female, for example in the phrase “the children of Israel”.
- For discussion of the range of meaning inherent in ho huios tou anthrōpou, and the New Testament’s novel but awkward use of the definite article with anthropos (not found in earlier Jewish texts or the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew phrase ben adam), see for example Michael Bird, The “Son of Man”: Six Interesting Facts about a Disputed Title, available at https://www.thenivbible.com/blog/the-son-of-man/; James Stalker, Son of Man, The, International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Online, available at https://www.internationalstandardbible.com/S/son-of-man-the.html;
- See https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/Matthew%204%3A4.
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