a split: the gap left where something that used to be one piece has come apart, whether a torn garment or a divided group of people.
The word begins with cloth. Sew a new, unshrunk patch onto an old coat, Jesus says, and the first time it tightens it will pull away and leave a worse split than the hole you were mending. That is the picture the word carries with it everywhere else: something was whole, and now there is a gap running through it.
John uses it for a crowd coming apart over Jesus. People hear a claim or watch a sign, and instead of one crowd there are suddenly two, arguing from opposite sides. He reports it three times without softening it, because in his telling the split is the crowd's answer. Paul then uses the same word for the same fracture inside a church. The Corinthians were still one congregation, still meeting in one room, but they lined up behind rival leaders and ate their meals in separate groups. When Paul says he wants no split in the body, he is leaning on the cloth picture again: a body, like a garment, is supposed to hold together as one piece.
Several Greek words circle this same trouble, and this one names the result rather than the cause:
- the arguing and rivalry that pull people apart is ἔρις
- the organized party that hardens out of the arguing is αἵρεσις
- the act of tearing something in two is the verb σχίζω
This word names what is left once that work is done: the rift itself, running through what used to be one thing.
Nuances
What the divisions at the Corinthian common meal actually were.
- contestedThe same loyalty-to-leaders parties Paul confronts at the start of the letter, now showing themselves at the table.; Margaret M. Mitchell, Paul and the Rhetoric of Reconciliation (1991)
- contestedA social and economic split between wealthier hosts and poorer members over the shared meal, distinct from the leader-loyalty parties of chapters 1 to 4.; Gerd Theissen, The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth (1982); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2000)