able, powerful: having what it takes to bring something about
This adjective belongs to a family of Greek words about being able, and its core idea is capacity: a person or a thing has what it takes to bring a result about. Greek stretches that one idea further than any single English word will go, which is why translations reach for "able," "mighty," "powerful," and "strong" in different places.
Which shade is in play is settled by the sentence, not by the word itself:
- paired with an action, it says that someone is able to carry that action through
- paired with the field someone excels in, it says that they are outstanding there, as Moses was in speech and action and Apollos was in the Scriptures
- standing on its own of a group, it names the influential people of a place, the ones who carry weight
- said of a thing rather than a person, it says that the thing is effective, forceful enough to get the result
The word carries its heaviest freight when it is applied to God. Mary can call God simply "the Mighty One," and the writers use the same word to say that God is able to keep a promise, able to graft branches back in, able to raise the dead. That is not a compliment but the ground of confidence: the promise will hold because the one who made it can deliver. Paul then turns the word inside out, saying that when he is weak, that is exactly when he is strong, because the capacity at work is God's and not his own.
It is worth keeping this word apart from the Greek adjective for sheer strength (ἰσχυρός), which pictures force or toughness. This one points instead at what someone is in a position to do. On the Hebrew side its nearest match is the word for a mighty warrior (גִּבּוֹר), which the old Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible regularly renders with it.
Nuances
Whether δυνατοί in 1 Corinthians 1:26 implies that genuinely high-status members belonged to the Corinthian congregation. The verse became the linchpin of the twentieth-century debate over the social level of the earliest Christians, since the phrase "not many were powerful" can be read either as conceding a wealthy minority or as denying real elites altogether.
- majorityThe congregation was socially stratified: predominantly humble, but including a minority of comparatively prosperous, locally influential householders whose relative status generated the community's conflicts over meat, lawsuits and the Lord's Supper.; Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth; Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul; Bruce W. Longenecker, Remember the Poor: Paul, Poverty, and the Greco-Roman World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010)
- minorityVirtually all early Christians, Corinth included, lived at or near subsistence level, so σοφοί / δυνατοί / εὐγενεῖς cannot be evidence of genuine elites within the assembly; the economic profile of the churches must be reconstructed on a poverty scale rather than from the older stratification model.; Justin J. Meggitt, Paul, Poverty and Survival (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998); Steven J. Friesen, "Poverty in Pauline Studies: Beyond the So-Called New Consensus," Journal for the Study of the New Testament 26.3 (2004): 323-361
The identity of οἱ δυνατοί, "the strong," in Romans 14:1-15:13, and how much of the term's ordinary social-political sense Paul retains when he applies it to the Roman house churches.
- majorityThe term marks strength of conviction: those whose faith leaves them free to eat anything and to treat all days alike, over against the scrupulous "weak." Any social connotation is secondary.; C. E. B. Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans, ICC, 2 vols.; Douglas J. Moo, The Letter to the Romans, NICNT; Frank Thielman, Romans, ZECNT
- minorityThe "weak" are chiefly Jewish believers (and Judaizing Gentiles) observing Torah food laws and Sabbaths, and "the strong" chiefly Gentile believers, including Paul, who feel released from them; the terms track the ethnic and congregational situation of Rome after Jewish Christians returned from the Claudian expulsion.; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, WBC 38B; Robert Jewett, Romans: A Commentary, Hermeneia; Mark D. Nanos, The Mystery of Romans: The Jewish Context of Paul's Letter (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles: Beyond the New Perspective
- minorityIn first-century Rome δυνατοί, ἀδύνατοι and ἀσθενεῖς functioned as markers of social status and honor, so "the strong" are higher-status members who treated abstinence and Sabbath as superstition, and Paul's "we who are strong ought to bear" trades on the Roman obligation binding the powerful to their inferiors.; Mark Reasoner, The Strong and the Weak: Romans 14.1-15.13 in Context, SNTS Monograph Series 103 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)