disgrace before others: the public loss of honor, whether the humiliation of being exposed to it or the shameful thing that brings it on
In the New Testament this word is not mainly a private, guilty feeling. Its center is public: the disgrace a person carries before others, the loss of standing when one is exposed to a watching audience. A related Greek word, αἰδώς, is the forward-looking modesty that holds someone back from disgrace; this word is the disgrace itself, felt or suffered once it has come.
It works in two directions. Sometimes it names the experience of being disgraced, as when a presumptuous dinner guest is demoted in front of everyone, or when Jesus endures the open dishonor of the cross. At other times it names the shameful thing itself: the disgraceful conduct people keep hidden, or the shameful deeds that surface as surely as foam on a rough sea.
The word also carries weight from the Greek Old Testament, where to be "put to shame" often meant to be let down in one's hope, or to be exposed as wrong at God's judgment. That covenant sense stands behind the New Testament's picture of a final unmasking, when what people trusted in and boasted about is shown for what it is.
The sharpest example is Christ "despising the shame" of the cross: he treated the crowd's verdict as worthless because the only verdict that counted was God's. Reading this word well means keeping that public, honor-and-dishonor world in view rather than a modern feeling of low self-worth.
Nuances
What αἰσχύνη refers to in the phrase "their glory is in their shame" (Philippians 3:19).
- majorityShameful conduct in general: the opponents boast in the very things that should disgrace them, an inversion of the true value-scheme.; Peter T. O'Brien, The Epistle to the Philippians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 456-57; Gordon D. Fee, Paul's Letter to the Philippians, NICNT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 371-72
- minorityA veiled reference to circumcision and the genitals, deploying shame as a phallic euphemism against the opponents.; Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism, and the Gentiles, SNTSMS 56 (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), 76; Ryan D. Collman, 'Beware the Dogs! The Phallic Epithet in Phil 3.2,' NTS 67 (2021): 105-20
- minorityIdolatry, on the basis of Greek Old Testament passages where the pagan god Baal is called simply "the shame."; John Gill, An Exposition of the New Testament (London, 1746-48), on Phil 3:19