“It Seemed Good to the Holy Spirit and to Us”

A reader writes:

"For it has 'seemed' good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols and froom blood and fromw what is strangled and froum unchastity" (Acts 15: 28-29).

This is taken from the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible, Second Edition.

An older Bible I have says, "It IS the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us…"

My question is why has it been modified from "is" to "seems?" When it is translated "seems," I think that adds ammunition to Protestants who would say, "See, the Church is not infallible when it makes doctrines because it only "seems" to be good to them."

Do you share my concern here? Could you address this and why on earth this current translation exists instead of the older, and I believe, more accurate one?

I understand the reader's concern, but I don't think it's necessary.

In particular, we (all of us, Catholics and Protestants alike) need to guard against preferring a particular translation because it's more useful. "More apologetically useful" does not equal "more accurate."

Our approach should be to try to figure out what the most accurate understanding of the text is and then assess what apologetic value it has. (And that's when we're trying to do biblical apologetics. If that's not our task at the moment then we may assess it in other terms–e.g., what it says about God [theology proper] or what moral lesson it carries [moral theology] or what we can learn for our own spriritual lives [spiritual theology].)

So what about Acts 15:28?

In Greek the phrase "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us" is edoksen gar tO pneumati tO hagiO kai hEmin. Broken out word by word, that's edoksen (it seemed good) gar (for) tO pneumati tO hagiO ([to] the Holy Spirit) kai (and) hEmin ([to] us).

The key word is thus edoksen, which is a form of the verb dokeO. Like most verbs, this one has several related meanings, and it does indeed mean things like "think, seem, seem good, appear, appear good, suppose, be of the opinion, judge, etc."

For a variety of reasons, the most logical literal translation is "For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us." I won't go into all the technical minutiae, but there is no noun there corresponding to "judgment." Edoksen is a verb with the implied subject "it" (it's 3rd person singular), and in context things like "it judged" make no sense (e.g., "It judged to the Holy Spirit and to us"?).

The proper literal translation would thus be something along the lines of "For it seemed/appeared good to the Holy Spirit and to us."

This is the way the Latin Vulgate takes the passage, too (since we're talking about older translations). In the Vulgate the phrase reads visum est enim Spiritui Sancto et nobis. This is a very straightforward translation of the Greek: visum est (it seemed good) enim (for) Spiritui Sancto ([to] the Holy Spirit] et (and) nobis ([to] us).

Visum est is a perfect passive form of the verb video, which (as you might guess) means "see" or "look at," but in the passive voice (which this is) means things like "seen," "seem," "seem good," "appear," and "appear good." Again, it has an implied subject of "it," and "it seemed good" or "it appeared good" is the most natural literal English translation.

(By the way, "the Holy Spirit and us" cannot be the subject of the verb in either Greek or Latin because the corresponding nouns are in a grammatical form known as the dative case, which prevents them from being subjects of the main verb; also, we'd have a compound subject which would lead one to expect the plural, and both verbs are singular; thus the correct subject of the verb is an implied "it.")

You'll note I've been saying that "it appeared/seemed good" is the most natural literal English translation, but one can use nonliteral ("dynamic") translations, which is what the reader's older Bible apparently does. I don't know what translation it is, but the thought that the Jerusalem Council is sending to the churches is that the decision of the Holy Spirit and the Jerusalem elders is that only minimal requirements should be made of Gentile converts for the sake of Church harmony.

If one is doing a free translation rather than a literal one, "It is the decision of" would be okay. It's just not what the Greek literally says.

The Greek also doesn't indicate any uncertainty about the resulting ruling, despite what "seem" or "appear" commonly connote in English. Instead, as a way of politely giving an order to the affected churches, the Jerusalem Council is using a literary form known as meiosis, which you deliberately understate something as a way of emphasizing it (e.g., calling the Atlantic Ocean "the Pond" when it is clearly vastly larger than a pond).

And less anybody reading the letter miss the point, the Holy Spirit is mentioned first in who the ruling seemed good to. The Holy Spirit is God, and thus omniscient and all-perfect, and anything that "seems good" to him may be taken as most definitively good.

Rather than timidity about the judgment, the way the letter is written stresses its authority, while using meiosis as a way of giving the order diplomatically.

With this understanding of the text we can now ask about its value for apologetics.

I wouldn't worry about the weaker-appearing verb "seemed" because it is the better literal translation, and it does not take away from the authority the letter had for the first century Church.

Further, even if this passage did express tentativeness, that would not disprove the Church's infallibility. There are lots of things the Church is tentative about. Some things that the first century Church was tentative about are mentioned in the Bible (e.g., when Paul expresses a personal judgment that he acknowledges he doesn't have a command from the Lord on).

But this passage isn't a tentative one. It's an emphatic one, and what it actually shows is that the Holy Spirit superintends certain kinds of Church councils and his authority backs them up.

That's a message that points in the direction of at least certain kinds of magisterial functions being infallible.

This doesn't give us a full-orbed theology of ecclesiastical infallibility, but it does point in the direction of that reality, and thus the passage has apologetic value even on the "weaker" (but more literal) understanding of what the letter said.

And, not coincidentally, the Acts 15 council is the paradigm for the ecumenical councils that have been held throughout Church history, so there is apologetic value there as well, with the Acts 15 council serving as precedent and model for them.

Hope this helps!