StrongerBible

chōris

χωρίς

GreekG5565“without, apart from, ...”

Appears 41 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 13:34Mat 14:21Mat 15:38Mrk 4:34Luk 6:49Jhn 1:3Jhn 15:5Jhn 20:7Rom 3:21Rom 3:28Rom 4:6Rom 7:8Heb 12:8
Word studyResearch-gradekho-REESpreposition (also used on its own as an adverb)

What chōris means

1

without, apart from: the thing named is missing or held separate, so whatever depends on it does not follow

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

The word began as a picture of space. It described things set in a place of their own, and from that it came to mean "without." Greek already had a plainer word for that (ἄνευ), and by the first century this one had almost crowded it out: the New Testament uses this word about forty times and the older one three. Writers who chose it were usually after more than simple lack. They wanted the sense of one thing standing clear of another.

Three shades of that run through the New Testament:

  • something needed is simply missing, so the expected result never comes (a house with no foundation, teaching with no parable, a message with no one to preach it)
  • something belongs to a separate sphere and has no part in the matter at all (Paul's "apart from law" and "apart from works")
  • someone is cut off from a person they depend on (branches severed from the vine, outsiders once far from Israel's Messiah)

Across the New Testament the word does the work of drawing a line. Hebrews stacks it into what sound like legal conditions: no oath, no blood, no mercy, no holiness, and therefore no result. Paul sets being apart from Christ against being in Christ. James makes the word carry a whole comparison, since a body with no breath in it is a corpse and faith with no deeds in it is just as dead.

Because it marks separation and not merely absence, the word tends to make a statement absolute. "Without faith it is impossible to please him" and "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness" are not cautious generalizations. They are stated as requirements that admit no exception.

Nuances

1awithout: something needed or expected is missing, so what depends on it does not happen
Mat 13:34Mrk 4:34Luk 6:49Rom 10:142Co 12:3Php 2:141Ti 2:81Ti 5:21Phm 1:14Heb 4:15Heb 7:7Heb 7:20
1bapart from, independently of: what is named belongs to a different sphere and has no part in the matter
TranslatabilityPartial
Rom 3:21Rom 3:28Rom 4:6Rom 7:8Rom 7:9
Rom 3:28

What χωρὶς ἔργων νόμου excludes from justification: works of any kind as a ground, or specifically the Torah observances that functioned as Jewish boundary markers.

  • majorityχωρίς excludes human works of every kind from the ground of justification, so that nothing a person does contributes to it; Romans 4:6, where νόμου drops away and only χωρὶς ἔργων remains, is taken as decisive.; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT, 2nd ed., 2018), 260-63, 289; Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans (BECNT, 2nd ed., 2018), 205-7, 227-28; C. E. B. Cranfield, "'The Works of the Law' in the Epistle to the Romans," JSNT 43 (1991): 89-101
  • minorityχωρίς excludes just as decisively, but its object is narrower: the boundary markers of Torah (circumcision, food laws, Sabbath) that separated Jew from Gentile, not moral effort as such.; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC 38A, 1988), 185-87, 205-6; N. T. Wright, Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision (IVP, 2009), 116-17
1ccut off from: separated from a person one belongs with or depends on
Jhn 1:3Jhn 15:51Co 4:81Co 11:11Eph 2:12Heb 11:40
Jhn 1:3

How to punctuate John 1:3-4, and therefore whether ὃ γέγονεν closes the χωρίς clause or opens the following sentence.

  • contestedὃ γέγονεν belongs with what follows ("without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being was life in him"), the reading of the ante-Nicene writers and of UBS3 onward.; Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd ed., UBS 1994), 167-68; Kurt Aland, "Eine Untersuchung zu Johannes 1, 3-4," ZNW 59 (1968): 174-209; Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (Anchor Bible 29, 1966), 6-7
  • contestedὃ γέγονεν closes the preceding clause ("without him not one thing came into being that has come into being"), on grounds of Johannine style and the awkwardness of the alternative.; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Pillar, 1991), 118-19; J. Ramsey Michaels, The Gospel of John (NICNT, 2010), 51-53; Dan Nasselqvist, "The Question of Punctuation in John 1:3-4: Arguments from Ancient Colometry," JBL 137 (2018): 175-91
1Co 11:11

Whether χωρίς in 1 Corinthians 11:11 asserts non-autonomy ("independent of") or inseparable mutual union ("not apart from").

  • contested"Independent of": Paul denies autonomy, and verses 11 to 12 correct and neutralize any hierarchy implied in verses 3 to 10.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT, rev. ed. 2014), 583-86
  • contested"Not separated from": Paul asserts inseparable mutuality that qualifies the earlier verses without overturning the order they set out.; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC, 2000), 838-41; Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians (Pillar, 2010), 528-31
2

besides, not counting: naming what is being left out of a count, not what is absent

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

When this word governs people or items in a tally, it does not say they were missing. It says they were not included in the number. Matthew twice reports the crowds Jesus fed as a count of men, then adds that women and children were there as well but were not counted. Paul closes a long list of hardships with a phrase that amounts to "and everything else besides."

This was ordinary business Greek. Contracts and receipts used the word to set items outside a total, in phrases like "apart from the dowry" and "besides the items listed above," and Greek historians were using it this way centuries before the New Testament. Reference works treat it as its own area of the word's meaning, because "besides" and "without" cannot be swapped for one another.

Mat 14:21Mat 15:382Co 11:28
3

separately, by itself: lying or placed in its own spot, apart from the rest

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is the word's oldest use, and the one place in the New Testament where it stands on its own instead of governing another word. Homer used it of cheeses sorted into separate piles, and it kept that plain force for centuries afterward.

John uses it of the cloth that had covered Jesus' head, found rolled up in a spot of its own rather than lying with the other wrappings. Nothing theological hangs on the word itself here. It simply records that one thing lay apart from another, in a scene the narrator reports with unusual care.

Jhn 20:7

What scholars say about chōris

The reference works structure χωρίς in two parts: an adverb ("separately, apart") and an improper preposition with the genitive ("without, apart from, besides"). BDAG (3rd ed., 1094-95) subdivides the prepositional use into (a) without a thing, (b) apart from a person, and (c) besides or in addition to, excluding from a count; Louw-Nida distributes it across three domains (63.27, 89.120, 89.121). Frisk, Chantraine, and Beekes derive it from χώρα / χῶρος ("space, place") with an adverbial suffix, the same root that yields χωρέω and χωρίζω, so the base image is occupying a separate place. A well attested Koine development stands behind the NT distribution: χωρίς progressively displaced ἄνευ as the ordinary word for "without" (41 to 3 in the NT, roughly 65 to 40 in the LXX, overwhelming dominance in the documentary papyri). BDF §216 and Robertson (Grammar, 636-39, 648) class it among the improper or adverbial prepositions and note that χωρὶς τοῦ plus infinitive is a post-classical formation, evidence that the word was expanding its syntactic range in the NT era. Muraoka gives מִלְּבַד and לְבַד as its commonest Hebrew equivalents, with בִּלְעֲדֵי, זוּלָה, and בְּלִי secondary, the enumerative sense dominating the cultic lists of Numbers 28-29. Moulton-Milligan documents the contract formulas (χωρὶς δόλου καὶ ἀπάτης, χωρὶς πάσης ἀντιλογίας, χωρὶς τῆς φερνῆς) that Hebrews' juridical diction closely mirrors, χωρὶς πάσης ἀντιλογίας at Heb 7:7 being a stock legal phrase. TDNT carries no article on χωρίς; EDNT (3:496-97) makes the load-bearing lexical claim that in Paul the word marks dissociation of category, so that χωρὶς νόμου δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ is righteousness in a category separate from law rather than righteousness merely lacking law. On the contested passages: at Rom 3:21 Moo reads the phrase salvation-historically of the Mosaic era, Käsemann apocalyptically of a rupture of the old aeon, Fitzmyer glosses "independently of"; at Rom 3:28 Moo, Schreiner, and Cranfield (JSNT 43 [1991]) take χωρίς as excluding works of any kind from the ground of justification, while Dunn and Wright keep the exclusion decisive but narrow its object to Torah's boundary markers, Rom 4:6 (χωρὶς ἔργων, with νόμου dropped) being the pivotal counter-text. At Rom 7:8-9 the "I" is read as Adamic or corporately Israelite by Moo, Cranfield, Dunn, Käsemann, and Jewett, with sin dormant rather than nonexistent apart from law. At 1 Cor 4:8 Fee, Thiselton, Hays, and Ciampa-Rosner all read sarcasm; at 1 Cor 11:11 Fee's "independent of" and Thiselton's "not separated from" divide the commentators and the English versions alike. At Eph 2:12 Hoehner, Best, Lincoln, O'Brien, and Thielman uniformly reject "Christless" in favor of relational messianic separation, set in antithesis to ἐν Χριστῷ in 2:13; at Philemon 14 Barclay reads the phrase more suspiciously than O'Brien and McKnight, as constructing a space of voluntariness that still secures Paul's desired outcome. All 13 Hebrews occurrences sit in legal, cultic, and conditional formulas. Heb 9:22 turns on αἱματεκχυσία, a Hebrews coinage studied by Thornton (JTS 15 [1964]: 63-65), with Bruce, Lane, Cockerill, and O'Brien reading shed blood as sacrificial death and Attridge, Ellingworth, Koester, Moffitt, and L. T. Johnson reading blood as life presented; Moffitt (2011) presses the second case and N. J. Moore (JTS 68 [2017]: 46-71) answers it, and the question is unresolved. Heb 4:15 is read concessively against Westcott's older proposal; Heb 9:28 is read "not to deal with sin"; Heb 12:8 preserves the rare predicative construction noted at BDF §216; Heb 12:14 places χωρίς after the relative pronoun, with ἁγιασμός as its antecedent. John 1:3 sits inside the punctuation dispute of John 1:3-4, where Metzger and Aland report the ante-Nicene consensus for taking ὃ γέγονεν with what follows while Carson, Morris, Michaels, Thompson, and Nasselqvist (JBL 137 [2018]: 175-91) favor the traditional stop; John 15:5 is read relationally rather than temporally by Brown, Barrett, Keener, Carson, and Thompson, with Carson limiting the "nothing" to fruit-bearing. James's four occurrences (2:18-26) are read as complementary to Paul by Moo, L. T. Johnson, Davids, McCartney, and McKnight, the general "works" of 2:26 excluding the possibility of inert faith rather than the ground of a verdict, and 2:20 carrying the wordplay of a faith that is itself work-less.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDAG, s.v. χωρίς, 3rd ed., 1094-95lexicon
  • LSJ, s.v. χωρίςlexicon
  • Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains (2nd ed., 1989), §§ 63.27, 89.120, 89.121lexicon
  • EDNT (Balz-Schneider), vol. 3, cols. 496-97, s.v. χωρίςreference
  • Takamitsu Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Peeters, 2009), s.v. χωρίςlexicon
  • Robert Beekes, Etymological Dictionary of Greek (Brill, 2010), s.v. χώρα, 1654-55lexicon
  • Moulton-Milligan, Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. χωρίςlexicon
  • Blass-Debrunner-Funk, A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature (1961), §216grammar
  • A. T. Robertson, A Grammar of the Greek New Testament in the Light of Historical Research (4th ed., 1934), 636-39, 648grammar
  • C. F. D. Moule, An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1959), 84-86grammar
  • Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans (NICNT, 2nd ed., 2018), 240-43, 260-63, 289, 465-71commentary
  • Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans (BECNT, 2nd ed., 2018), 205-7, 227-28commentary
  • C. E. B. Cranfield, "'The Works of the Law' in the Epistle to the Romans," JSNT 43 (1991): 89-101article
  • James D. G. Dunn, Romans 1-8 (WBC 38A, 1988), 165, 185-87, 205-6commentary
  • Ernst Käsemann, Commentary on Romans (Eerdmans, 1980), 93, 195-96commentary
  • Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT, rev. ed. 2014), 187-89, 583-86commentary
  • Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC, 2000), 357-60, 838-41commentary
  • Ernest Best, Ephesians (ICC, T&T Clark, 1998), 240-43commentary
  • Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia, 1989), 140-41, 258-60, 266-67, 361, 368-69commentary
  • Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NIGTC, 1993), 269-70, 473-75, 651-52, 663-64commentary
  • William L. Lane, Hebrews 9-13 (WBC 47B, 1991), 244-46, 449-51commentary
  • Gareth L. Cockerill, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NICNT, 2012), 226-28, 411-13commentary
  • T. G. C. Thornton, "The Meaning of αἱματεκχυσία in Heb. IX.22," JTS 15 (1964): 63-65article
  • David M. Moffitt, Atonement and the Logic of Resurrection in the Epistle to the Hebrews (NovTSup 141; Brill, 2011), 218-29, 256-96monograph
  • Nicholas J. Moore, "Jesus' Heavenly Sacrifice in Early Christian Reception of Hebrews," JTS 68 (2017): 46-71article
  • Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (2nd ed., UBS 1994), 167-68reference
  • Kurt Aland, "Eine Untersuchung zu Johannes 1, 3-4. Über die Bedeutung eines Punktes," ZNW 59 (1968): 174-209article
  • Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (Anchor Bible 29, 1966), 6-7commentary
  • D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (Pillar, 1991), 118-19, 517-18commentary
  • Dan Nasselqvist, "The Question of Punctuation in John 1:3-4: Arguments from Ancient Colometry," JBL 137 (2018): 175-91article
  • Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James (Anchor Bible 37A, 1995), 246-47commentary
  • Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James (Pillar, 2000), 133-35, 141-43commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of χωρίς

prep

χωρὶς, χωρίς

Mat 13:34, Mat 14:21, Mat 15:38, Mrk 4:34, Luk 6:49, Jhn 1:3, Jhn 15:5, Jhn 20:7