unaccusable: so clear of any real charge that no accusation against the person would stand.
This is a word from the courtroom. It is built from a negative prefix plus the ordinary Greek verb for bringing a legal charge against someone (ἐγκαλέω, "to accuse"), so it means, quite literally, "not chargeable": a person against whom no accusation can be made to stick. In everyday Greek life it was the stock word for a public official who finished his term of office and no citizen came forward to complain: the accounts were approved, the audit passed, the case closed.
Paul reaches for it in two very different settings:
- Of God's people at the last day, promising that they will stand before God with no charge that can be brought against them (1 Corinthians 1:8; Colossians 1:22).
- Of candidates for church leadership, requiring elders and deacons whose examined lives turn up no sustainable complaint (1 Timothy 3:10; Titus 1:6 and 1:7).
The key nuance is that the word is objective, not a matter of reputation. One neighbor word for "blameless" (ἄμεμπτος) is about whether people happen to find fault with you; this word is about whether a charge would actually hold up. Its closest overlap is with the term rendered "above reproach" (ἀνεπίλημπτος), which pictures giving an opponent no handhold to grab. In Colossians it stands next to a purity word, "without blemish" (ἄμωμος).
There is a deep resonance beneath the two church settings. When Paul says believers will be unaccusable, he is answering in a single word his own challenge in Romans, "Who will bring a charge against God's elect?", which uses the very verb this word is built from. No one will, because no charge is admissible.
Nuances
Disputed
How much of the word's forensic, administrative flavor Paul intends in the church-office qualification lists, and whether his switch from anepilēmptos (1 Timothy 3:2) to anenklētos in Titus 1:6-7 is deliberate.
- majorityIn the qualification lists the word functions as a general "above reproach," essentially interchangeable with the near-synonym anepilēmptos used in 1 Timothy 3:2; the variation between the two is stylistic rather than loaded.; I. Howard Marshall (with Philip H. Towner), The Pastoral Epistles, ICC (T&T Clark, 1999); William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, WBC 46 (Nelson, 2000); George W. Knight III, The Pastoral Epistles, NIGTC (Eerdmans, 1992)
- minorityThe word keeps its administrative, courtroom coloring: Paul chose it in Titus to match the picture of the overseer as God's household steward, echoing the standard honor Greek cities paid to officials whose public audit produced no successful accusation.; Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, tr. James Ernest (Hendrickson, 1994), s.v.; Jerome D. Quinn, The Letter to Titus, AB 35 (Doubleday, 1990), on 1:6
- minorityThe word is subtly distinct from its neighbor: it means "unaccused" (no charge has actually been lodged), whereas anepilēmptos means offering no ground to lay hold of a charge in the first place.; R. C. Trench, Synonyms of the New Testament, section ciii