Called it.
The previous post in this series said the responses were coming. It named the passages that would be cited. It described the argument that would be made. And right on schedule, with the reliability of a car alarm going off in the church parking lot during the third verse of the invitation song, the responses came.
Romans 16:17. Matthew 18. You have not done the exegesis. You do not understand the Greek. Paul said mark and avoid. Jesus said treat him as a Gentile and a tax collector. The text supports the application and if you understood the original language you would know that.
Fair enough. The text deserves the full treatment. So here it is — the Greek, the scholarship, the context, and the argument the original language actually makes when you follow it where it leads rather than where the institutional machinery needs it to go.
That destination is not where the machine has been sending people.
The Greek Words The Machine People Know
Give credit where it is due. The people making the original language argument are not wrong about the words.
Skopeo — the Greek word translated mark in the King James. Present tense infinitive meaning continuous, sustained observation. It is the root from which English derives telescope and microscope. The idea is the focused, unbroken attention of a sentinel in a watchtower. Paul is not describing a casual glance. The word carries real weight and the people citing it know that.
Ekklino — turn away from. Present imperative. Keep on continually turning away. The same word describes a soldier deserting his post, a joint being dislocated, a traveler staying clear of prickly shrubs. Decisive, sustained, ongoing avoidance. The word carries real weight here too.
Both words support the argument that Paul meant serious, comprehensive, continuous separation from the people he was describing.
Now here is the part the machine people tend to move past quickly.
Who was Paul describing?
The Words They Tend To Skip
The Greek word Paul uses for what the target is doing is dichostasia. Divisions. This word appears exactly three times in the entire New Testament — Romans 16:17, First Corinthians 3:3, and Galatians 5:20.
In Galatians 5:20 Paul lists dichostasia as a work of the flesh. It sits in that list alongside sexual immorality, idolatry, sorcery, and hatred. Paul considered the causing of divisions a serious enough offense to place it in the same category as those things. The machine people citing Romans 16:17 are citing a passage whose central charge is one of the works of the flesh.
That is worth holding onto. We will come back to it.
Paul also places the definite article before both divisions and offenses in the Greek. Scholars across the board note this matters. He wrote the divisions and the offenses — not a general warning about anyone who might someday cause disruption, but a reference to a specific known pattern the Roman believers would recognize when they encountered it. The Romans already knew what he was talking about.
Then Paul describes the target in verse 18 with precision the machine people tend to summarize rather than quote directly. These people serve not Christ but their own belly — koilia in Greek, literally their own stomach, their own appetite. They use chrēstologia and eulogia — smooth talk and flattery — to deceive the hearts of the naive.
Smooth talk. Flattery. Self-serving. Deceptive. Causing divisions contrary to the gospel already received.
That is Paul’s description of the target. Read it slowly and then ask the honest question. In the situations where mark and avoid has been invoked in practice — the member who asked hard questions about whether Sunday morning matches Acts 2, the family that left for another congregation, the blogger whose posts the elders found inconvenient — does Paul’s description fit that person?
Or does smooth talk, flattery, self-serving behavior, and the causing of divisions describe something else in those situations more accurately?
One more observation before the answer to that question becomes unavoidable. Bible.org’s commentary on Romans 16:17 states plainly what careful scholarship has consistently recognized — there are many areas of doctrine where godly Christians may differ and still be saved, including various views on baptism, church government, spiritual gifts, and other secondary issues. The passage Paul wrote was directed at people undermining the core gospel, not people raising questions about secondary institutional practice.
That distinction has been carefully erased by every application of mark and avoid that the institutional machinery has run against people who disturbed the arrangement rather than corrupted the gospel.
Matthew 18 And The Process Nobody Completed
The four steps Jesus laid out in Matthew 18:15-17 have a specific Greek structure that the machine people’s argument requires ignoring.
Step one: go to him privately, between you and him alone. The word for you throughout verse 15 is sou — singular. One person going to one person. Not a delegation. Not a pre-assembled group of witnesses. One person, privately, with the goal of gaining a brother. The Greek word for gained is kerdainō — the same word Paul uses in First Corinthians 9:19-23 for winning people to the gospel. The goal from the first step to the last is recovery, not removal.
Steps two through four each carry an explicit conditional in the Greek — if this step fails, then the next step applies. The sequence is mandatory. It is not a menu from which you select the most institutionally convenient option. You cannot invoke step four without honestly completing steps one through three.
The public ambush conducted in a crowded restaurant with witnesses present fails step one before step one is attempted. The text message composed at an unusual hour is not going privately in any sense the passage intends. The freeze running through the building before a single private conversation has taken place is not Matthew 18. It is Matthew 18 wearing a costume while doing the opposite of what Matthew 18 requires.
The Tax Collector Problem
Here is where the machine people’s argument hits a wall it cannot get over.
The standard application of Matthew 18:17 treats “let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” as authorization for comprehensive social avoidance. Shun him. Withdraw fellowship. Have nothing to do with him. The argument draws on the historical reality that in first century Jewish culture, tax collectors were social outcasts shunned by respectable religious society.
That argument requires ignoring Matthew 9:9-13. Jesus walked past a tax collector sitting at his booth, looked at him, and said follow me. He called a tax collector to be one of the twelve apostles. The man whose name is on the Gospel containing Matthew 18:17 was a tax collector before Jesus got to him.
It requires ignoring Luke 19. Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector — the elevated category, the man enriching himself at his own people’s expense on behalf of Rome. The Pharisees had no category for helping a man like that. Jesus looked up into the tree where Zacchaeus was hiding and invited himself to dinner. Salvation came to that house the same evening.
It requires ignoring Matthew 11:19 where Jesus is publicly criticized as a friend of tax collectors and sinners and does not dispute the characterization.
Richard France — one of the foremost scholars on Matthew’s Gospel — notes that the phrase let him be to you is addressed to the singular you. The offended individual. Not the church deploying a collective institutional sanction. France reads this as instruction to one person managing a personal relationship with someone who has refused every appeal.
The Lectionary Greek commentary states it plainly — Jesus does not give permission to drop the unrepentant person. He instructs the offended party to bear them, continue to pursue them, and accept the social cost of continuing to care for someone who has been difficult. Not to freeze them. Not to run the whisper network about them. To bear them the way Jesus bore tax collectors — with pursuing grace and an open door.
Let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector means treat him the way Jesus treated Gentiles and tax collectors. That reading is the only one the rest of the Gospels will sustain.
The Answer To The Question The Text Actually Asks
Here is where both passages end up when you follow the Greek honestly.
Paul charged the people described in Romans 16:17 with dichostasia. Work of the flesh. Galatians 5:20. Causing divisions contrary to the gospel already received.
The question the text actually asks — the one that has not been asked honestly in most of the situations where the machinery ran — is this.
Who is causing the dichostasia?
Is it the woman at the well who asked honest questions about where and how to worship — and got a theological conversation with Jesus instead of a freeze? Is it Zacchaeus, written off by the entire religious establishment, whom Jesus pursued anyway? Is it the prodigal son’s older brother — faithful, institutional, resentful of grace extended to the one who disturbed the arrangement — who caused the division in that story? Paul described the target of Romans 16:17 with precision. Smooth talk. Flattery. Self-serving behavior. Divisions caused contrary to the received gospel. Apply that description honestly to the pattern and see where it lands.
The apparatus deployed to combat dichostasia has frequently been dichostasia itself. The people running Romans 16:17 against honest questioners have been doing the very thing Romans 16:17 targets. The work of the flesh running under the cover of a passage about the work of the flesh.
The text does not support the application. The text indicts it.
That is what the Greek says. The machine people are welcome to the comment section.
Truth Over Comfort. Always.
