accord: two parties being of one mind, as though they had settled on terms together
This word appears once in the whole Bible. In 2 Corinthians 6:15 Paul asks what accord Christ has with Belial, the name Jewish writers of the period used for Satan. The question is not asking for information: the expected answer is none, and the deeper point is that none is even possible.
The word is built out of two Greek pieces meaning "together" and "sound," so at bottom it pictures two things sounding as one. The family it belongs to was ordinary, everyday Greek, and its verb (συμφωνέω) covers a wide spread of uses in the New Testament:
- two people who see a matter the same way and pray about it together
- a landowner and his workers settling on a day's wage
- a new patch that does not match the old garment it is sewn onto
- two people who have quietly agreed with each other to deceive
By the first century the everyday sense of this family was simply coming to terms, and the ordinary business papers of the day, leases and sale contracts and wage agreements, use it that way constantly.
The verse stands in a run of five questions, each pairing two things that cannot be joined, and each reaching for a different word for having something in common: a share in the same thing (μετοχή), fellowship (κοινωνία), this word, a portion that falls to someone (μερίς), and going along with something (συγκατάθεσις). The five are close enough in meaning that the variety is there for the force of the writing rather than to draw fine distinctions. What this particular word adds is the note of being in tune: whatever Christ and Belial are, they can never be brought into one key.
The way the question is put makes it sound almost like a proposed treaty, asking what terms these two could ever settle on. Business documents of the period used this family of words for exactly that, naming the deal struck and even the sum agreed upon. Read against that background, the question is not whether Christ and Belial happen to disagree, but whether any binding arrangement between them is thinkable at all.
Whether 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1, the paragraph containing this word, is a non-Pauline interpolation, a pre-existing fragment Paul adapted, or Paul's own composition. The paragraph's Qumran-like light/darkness dualism, its Βελιάρ reference, and its concentration of terms found nowhere else in Paul (συμφώνησις, μετοχή, συγκατάθεσις) are the central pieces of evidence marshalled on the interpolation side; συμφώνησις in particular is unattested in the LXX and in pre-Christian secular Greek.
- contestedThe paragraph is a non-Pauline insertion of Jewish, possibly Essene, character, placed into the letter by a later hand; in its strongest form the thesis holds the fragment to be positively anti-Pauline.; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, "Qumran and the Interpolated Paragraph in 2 Cor 6:14-7:1," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 23 (1961): 271-280; Hans Dieter Betz, "2 Cor 6:14-7:1: An Anti-Pauline Fragment?" Journal of Biblical Literature 92 (1973): 88-108
- contestedThe paragraph is a pre-existing block of material shaped by Qumran-style thought that Paul himself reworked and inserted at this point in the letter.; Ralph P. Martin, 2 Corinthians, Word Biblical Commentary 40 (Waco: Word, 1986)
- contestedPaul wrote the paragraph himself; its covenant and separation theme belongs to the argument of chapters 5-7, and the rhetorical piling up of parallel questions accounts for the unusual vocabulary without recourse to a source.; G. K. Beale, "The Old Testament Background of Reconciliation in 2 Corinthians 5-7 and Its Bearing on the Literary Problem of 2 Corinthians 6:14-7:1," New Testament Studies 35 (1989): 550-581; Philip E. Hughes, Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962)
Disputed
Whether συμφώνησις at 2 Corinthians 6:15 retains a live musical image (Christ and Belial as strings that could only sound discord) or functions as an abstract term for accord between parties, the musical etymology being dormant.
- majorityThe noun functions abstractly as "concord, agreement," its sense fixed by the chain of non-musical partnership nouns among which it stands (μετοχή, κοινωνία, μερίς, συγκατάθεσις); the musical origin of the συμφων- group is etymological background, not foreground imagery.; LSJ, s.v. συμφώνησις; Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. συμφώνησις; The Expositor's Greek Testament, vol. 3 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1903), on 2 Corinthians 6:15
- minorityThe noun keeps its acoustic force: it denotes the unison produced by instruments in a chord, so the question asks what strings, struck together, could ever yield harmony between Christ and Belial, the answer being that only discord is possible.; Albert Barnes, Notes on the Whole Bible (1870), on 2 Corinthians 6:15