Bible Synapse
If Christians are to bless and not curse, why does Paul pronounce curses?
Hard question · Acts and the letters · raised by 1 of the lists sceptics circulate
See the passages joined in the interactive mapThe passages
“Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.”
Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.
If anyone, even “we, or an angel from heaven”, preaches another gospel, “let him be accursed”; Paul says it twice.
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, If any man preach any other gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.
“If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha.”
If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maran-atha.
The objection
Paul tells the Romans to bless those who persecute them and not to curse them. Yet he himself twice declares that anyone who preaches another gospel is to be accursed, and he ends 1 Corinthians by saying that anyone who does not love the Lord is to be ‘Anathema’. Is a Christian allowed to curse people or not?
The answer
Romans 12:14 forbids answering personal injury with ill will. Its subject is how to treat “them which persecute you”, and the passage goes on: “Recompense to no man evil for evil” and “avenge not yourselves”, leaving vengeance to God (12:17–19). The word for ‘curse’ there, kataraomai, means to call down harm on someone, here on one’s own enemies. Jesus taught the same (Luke 6:28), and Paul lived by it: “being reviled, we bless” (1 Corinthians 4:12).
The passages in Galatians and 1 Corinthians are of another kind. Paul is not hitting back at people who have wronged him; he is declaring God’s verdict. His word is anathema, which in the Greek Old Testament stands for the Hebrew ḥērem, a thing devoted to God for destruction (as in Deuteronomy 7:26). The curse in Galatians is aimed at no personal enemy. It falls on anyone who preaches a different gospel, Paul himself and “an angel from heaven” included (Galatians 1:8). Its point is that the gospel belongs to God, and to corrupt it is to come under his judgment. In 1 Corinthians 16:22 the next word, Maran-atha, is Aramaic for ‘Our Lord, come’ or ‘the Lord is coming’: the outcome is left to the Lord himself at his coming. That is just what Romans 12:19 asks of believers: “give place unto wrath”.
These words did not come from spite. The same Paul wished that he himself might be “accursed from Christ” for the sake of his unbelieving people (Romans 9:3). Gill draws the line this way: a mouth full of cursing is forbidden to Christians, but the solemn sentences of God’s judgment given through inspired men do not break that rule.
Other answers Christians give
Church discipline
Some see in Paul’s anathema the language of putting someone out of the fellowship of the church, as with the man put out in 1 Corinthians 5:4–5. On that reading too it is a solemn act of the church under God, not a private curse.
Still open
Whether Maran-atha should be read as a prayer (‘Our Lord, come!’) or a statement (‘the Lord is coming’, or ‘has come’) depends on how the Aramaic is divided, and scholars differ. Either way it points to the Lord as judge.
From the classic commentators
The imprecations upon wicked men, used by David and other good men, are no contradictions to this rule; since they were made under the inspiration of the Spirit of God, and were predictions of God's vengeance, which in righteous judgment should fall on them, and are not to be drawn into an example by us.John Gill, Exposition of the Bible, on Romans 12:14 (1746–1763)