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May 3, 2023 · In verse 9 of Philippians 3, Paul tells his readers that it is his desire to be found in Christ, “not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is dia pisteos christou, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of faith.”. There are six other passages in Paul’s writings where the construction pistis ...
May 25, 2021 · Pistis Christou. The title of this article reflects a debate among Pauline scholars called the pistis Christou debate. This debate is over whether the phrase pistis Christou, which occurs eight times in Paul’s letters, means “faith in Christ” (as the ESV translates it) or “the faithfulness of Christ” (as the NET Bible translates it).
- Grammatical Arguments
- The Third View
- Recent Scholarship
- New Directions and Habakkuk 2:4
1.a. Grammatical foundation
My basic grammatical argument can be distilled to something quite simple. Just like the verbal constructions believe in and believe that in English are different grammatical constructions that have different meanings, so also the nominal constructions belief in and belief thatare different grammatical constructions with different meanings. This can be demonstrated with the following set of examples: 1. John believed Mary that she raised a pet bear. 2. John believed in Mary that she could rais...
1.b. The objective genitive view
This foray into grammar lays the foundation for our approach to pistis Christou. The basic argument is simple: pistis behaves just like belief in English. It is a so-called deverbal noun that reflects the structure and meaning of its verbal counterpart. Those arguing for the objective genitive position normally translate the phrase as “belief in,” but the problem with this is that the noun pistis does not have the meaning “belief in” when it has an objective genitive. The noun pistis with an...
1.c. The subjective genitive view
At this point, the subjectivists are beginning to raise their flag in victory. This has been the nature of the debate. It has been assumed that there are only two interpretive options (“faith in Christ” or “faithfulness of Christ”), so both sides have treated an argument against the other side as an argument fortheir side. As the title of my article suggests, this is an overhasty conclusion—there is a third contender in the fight. But before turning to the third view, we must note that there...
If both sides are wrong, what other options do we have? I suggest that the best translation of the phrase is “Christ-faith,” or the faith that is about Jesus the Christ. I am not the first to advocate for a third view. (Preston Sprinkle has helpfully cataloged all those in the modern era that held such a view.)4 Unlike advocates of either the objec...
Since publishing my article, the pistis Christou debate has continued to receive its fair share of treatment in the scholarly world. One significant work published a year before mine (but after mine was already written and under review) is The Faithfulness of the Risen Christ by David Downs and Benjamin Lappenga, which, as mentioned above, was disc...
Let me conclude by discussing one more potential implication of my understanding of the pistis Christou phrase. Once we admit that the noun pistis may mean a system that can be adopted, this then becomes a possible meaning in other places as well, and reading Paul’s quote of Habakkuk 2:4 in this way makes a lot of sense, both of the context and the...
Mar 3, 2014 · An enduring discussion in Pauline studies is the so-called pistis Christou debate. This involves the half-dozen cases in the undisputed Pauline letters where this genitive phrase appears and it is unclear whether the phrase should be read ‘faith in Christ’ or ‘the faithfulness of Christ’. Over the past several decades, numerous books ...
Jan 9, 2012 · There are a number of scholars who have been persuaded that pistis Christou means ‘faithfulness of Christ’, but that this does not alter the fact that Paul taught that justification was by faith in Christ, and not by works of the law. There are other scholars, such as Wright, Hays and many ‘New Perspective’ advocates, who would argue ...
[Please visit: The Catholic Perspective on Paul] While at Dr. Hahn’s, one of the things he discussed was the significance of the debate surrounding the so-called “pistis Christou” passages in the New Testament (Rom. 3:22, 26, Gal. 2:16; 3:22, Eph. 3:12, Phil 3:9). Taken subjectively, Saint Paul’s Greek phrase “pistis Christou” can mean “the faith […]
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What does Pistis mean in the Bible?
For example, when Jesus tells the disciples, “Have pistis in God” (Mark 11:22), he is urging them to trust in God when they pray. When Paul speaks of God’s pistis (e.g., Rom 3:3), he is referring to God’s trustworthiness in fulfilling God’s promises. When Paul reminds the Corinthians “that Christ died for our sins,” he says, “so ...
