without strength: lacking the power, health, or standing that would make someone or something able and secure
At its root this word means simply "strengthless." It is the plain opposite of being strong, and the New Testament stretches that one idea across the whole of human life. A body can be strengthless (sick, or merely frail and tired), a person can be strengthless in the world's eyes (poor, lowly, unable to help themselves), a thing can be strengthless in effect (a rule or a religious practice that cannot actually deliver what people hoped for), and a believer can be strengthless in conscience or faith (easily unsettled about what is allowed).
These are not different words but one word following the shape of its contexts. Where Greek had a narrower word that meant only being ill (ἄρρωστος), this one reaches much further. What holds its uses together is the picture of someone or something that cannot stand on its own power and so depends on help from outside. That is why the same word names both the invalid Jesus heals and the sinner who could do nothing to save himself.
The word carries no automatic blame. Being strengthless is usually a plain fact about a condition, not a moral failing. Paul, in fact, turns it upside down: God deliberately chooses the strengthless people, and the message that looks weakest proves stronger than human power. The reader's main task is to notice which kind of weakness a given verse has in view, because English needs a different word (sick, feeble, powerless, weak in faith) for almost each one.
Nuances
Who "the weak" are in 1 Corinthians 8 to 10: believers with over-scrupulous consciences about idol-food, or lower-status, poorer members for whom meat was rare and religiously loaded.
- majorityPrimarily a matter of conscience: the weak lack the secure knowledge that idols are nothing, so their fragile self-understanding is wounded when they see others eating idol-food, and Paul's concern is chiefly moral and psychological.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT), Eerdmans; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC), Eerdmans; Peter Gooch, "'Conscience' in 1 Corinthians 8 and 10," NTS 33 (1987): 244-254
- minorityPrimarily social and economic: the weak are the poor, for whom meat was rare and tied to pagan sacrifice, while the strong are wealthier, educated members appealing to their knowledge; in Greek, scruple, health, and status were not cleanly separable.; Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity, trans. J. H. Schütz, Fortress, 1982; Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body, Yale University Press, 1995