xenos

In the ancient Mediterranean world a stranger was a person in a precarious spot: away from home, without the protection of family or local ties, and dependent on the kindness of others. The New Testament uses this word for that whole range of not-belonging, from the traveler who needs a bed for the night to the foreigner living in someone else's city.

The senses shade into one another. Sometimes the stranger is the guest who must be welcomed, as when Jesus says, "I was a stranger and you took me in." Sometimes it is simply an outsider to a people or place, like the resident foreigners in Athens or those with no family plot for burial. Sometimes it becomes the way believers describe themselves: strangers and pilgrims on the earth, at home somewhere else. And paired with an object it can mean cut off from something one should share in, as when Gentiles are called strangers to the covenants of promise.

Two nearby Greek words fill out the picture. A πάροικος is a resident foreigner with a recognized but limited standing, and a παρεπίδημος is a temporary resident just passing through. This word is the broadest of the three: the outsider as such, whoever and wherever they are.

This is the surprising flip side of the word. Because a stranger and the person who took the stranger in were bound together in one relationship of hospitality, the same Greek word could name either party. So when Paul calls Gaius his host and the host of the whole church, he uses the very word that elsewhere means stranger.

The reciprocity is the point: in that culture the outsider at your door today might be your welcomer tomorrow, and the bond of hospitality ran both directions. One recent view argues that even here the word keeps its ordinary meaning of guest, making Gaius a visitor rather than a patron, but most read it as host.

Used of things rather than people, the word means unfamiliar, foreign, coming from outside what one knows. The philosophers in Athens dismiss Paul as a promoter of foreign gods; Hebrews warns against strange teachings that pull believers away from Christ; and Peter tells suffering Christians not to be caught off guard by their trials as though something foreign were happening to them.

The link to the outsider sense is deliberate. A strange teaching is one that comes from outside the gospel, and Peter's play on words turns on it: what looks foreign to the watching world is actually native to the Christian life. Those who are treated as outsiders should not be surprised at being treated as outsiders.