genuine, with no act put on: a quality that is really there rather than staged for the people watching.
This word is built by putting a "not" on the front of the Greek family that gave English the word "hypocrisy", so it works by denial. That family started out in the theater, where the related noun (ὑποκριτής) named the actor who answered the chorus, and it came to name any public show that could not be trusted (ὑπόκρισις). To call something genuine in this sense is to say that nobody is acting.
Every time it appears in the New Testament it vouches for something good, and always for something that could be faked convincingly:
- love, which can be performed for onlookers while the heart stays cold (Romans 12:9, 2 Corinthians 6:6)
- affection among fellow believers, easy to display in public and withhold in private (1 Peter 1:22)
- faith, which can be recited as a set of beliefs by someone who does not actually trust God (1 Timothy 1:5, 2 Timothy 1:5)
- wisdom, which can be worn as a pose while the real motive is rivalry (James 3:17)
Notice what the word does not claim. It says nothing about how strong or how warm the quality is, only that it is real. Paul calls a faith genuine because he watched it pass from Timothy's grandmother to his mother and then to Timothy himself (2 Timothy 1:5), and Peter asks for an affection that shows up in how believers actually treat one another (1 Peter 1:22). The test is always whether what is on display matches what is underneath, which is the same test the words for hypocrisy apply from the other side.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the negated adjective denies play-acting (the older Greek sense of the ὑποκρίνομαι group) or denies the godlessness the same group carries in Hellenistic Jewish Greek.
- majorityIt means genuine, unfeigned: the quality it modifies is actually present and is not an outward show staged for other people.; BDAG (Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, 3rd ed. (2000), s.v. ἀνυπόκριτος; LSJ (Liddell-Scott-Jones), A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. with revised supplement (1996), s.v. ἀνυπόκριτος; C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament, 3 vols. (1994), s.v. ἀνυπόκριτος
- minorityThe word group had been moralized in Jewish Greek into a term for godlessness and apostasy, so the negated adjective describes devotion that is undivided toward God rather than conduct that is simply unstaged.; Ulrich Wilckens, "ὑποκρίνομαι, συνυποκρίνομαι, ὑπόκρισις, ὑποκριτής, ἀνυπόκριτος," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 8:559-571