There’s a certain passage which has caused a lot of confusion and concern among English-speaking members of the body of Christ — that passage being 1 Corinthians 15:1-2 — so I want to share my thoughts on it. I will say, I could be wrong about my interpretation of this passage, as it’s possible there’s some nuance in the Greek or even in the context that I’m missing, but right now this interpretation makes the most sense to me.
The reason this passage is so troubling to some is the way it’s translated in the CLV (the Concordant Literal Version of the Bible, which is the Bible translation that English-speaking members of the body of Christ tend to use most often), which is somewhat different from the way many other Bible versions render it:
Now I am making known to you, brethren, the evangel which I bring to you, which also you accepted, in which also you stand, through which also you are saved, if you are retaining what I said in bringing the evangel to you, outside and except you believe feignedly.
The way the CLV renders this passage has led many believers to ask themselves whether they ever truly believed Paul’s Gospel (or evangel, as the CLV transliterates the Greek word εὐαγγέλιον/“yoo-ang-ghel’-ee-on”) and are truly in the body of Christ, or if they themselves instead actually believed feignedly. Well, to anyone asking whether they believed feignedly or not, I’d first ask them whether they truly understand and believe that when Paul wrote in his evangel (which he laid out in the next two verses: For I give over to you among the first what also I accepted, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that He was entombed, and that He has been roused the third day according to the scriptures) ”that Christ died for our sins,” he meant that all sin has now been dealt with completely and every human who will ever have lived will be saved in the end (referring to the general salvation of all humanity, not the special salvation that one who believes this evangel gets to experience as well); that when he wrote “He was entombed,” he meant Christ Himself was entombed and not just His body while He went elsewhere (which means that He ceased to exist as a conscious being when He died and spent those three days in the tomb He was entombed in for that time period); and that when he wrote “He has been roused the third day,” he meant that Jesus’ dead body was physically resurrected (and that He isn’t now simply existing as a glorified ghost in another dimension, the way some people believe He is). If they truly understand and believe these things, they can be said to have been saved (referring again to the special salvation, meaning they’ve been brought into membership in the body of Christ and will get to enjoy all the privileges this entails long before everyone else experiences their own salvation at a later date) and they are not a feigned believer.
That all being said, there’s another reason I believe they’re not feigned believers, and this is because I believe that “believe feignedly” is a poor translation of the original Greek in this passage. Simply put, there is no perfect translation of Scripture, and as good a translation as the Concordant Literal Version is overall (and it is quite a good literal translation for the most part), there are translations in the CLV which can lead people astray if they aren’t careful in their interpretations (just the same as there are in any Bible translation), and I believe this particularly applies to 1 Corinthians 15:2 in this Bible version.
That’s not to say there can’t be such a thing as a feigned believer, but I don’t believe this verse is referring to that sort of person. The word “feign” means “to purposely pretend,” so a truly feigned believer would be someone who doesn’t believe (which means they know they don’t believe), but is pretending (feigning) that they do, presumably for the purpose of leading true believers away from their faith (Paul refers to these sort of people as “false brethren” in other places). But if “believe feignedly” is a poor translation of the verse, as I believe it to be, this verse isn’t referring to that sort of person.
Instead, my understanding of what Paul was saying there is that his readers were saved (referring, again, to the special salvation of believers, not the general salvation of all humanity because of Christ’s death for our sins, entombment, and resurrection) when they believed the evangel, unless his evangel wasn’t actually true, in which case it didn’t matter how sincere their belief was because it would then be pointless to believe it.
You see, we have to remember that the immediate context of Paul even repeating his evangel in this chapter in the first place was in connection with the topic of whether the dead are resurrected or not. He didn’t just include his evangel in the chapter arbitrarily. In fact, the main reason he even wrote this chapter was because there was a debate taking place in the Corinthian ecclesia (church) at the time as to whether the dead will be physically resurrected in the future. Some had stopped believing in a resurrection at all (as we learn from verse 12), so Paul had to remind them of what they originally believed when they were saved (by repeating his evangel in verses 3 and 4, which included the fact that Jesus had been roused, meaning resurrected from the dead). Basically, Paul was telling his readers that, if Jesus wasn’t resurrected the way his evangel says He was, their entire belief in his evangel is for naught (or “is in vain,” meaning it would be pointless to be believed) because his evangel would then not be true, and they weren’t even saved at all if that’s the case. And if Jesus was resurrected, as his evangel states, there’s no reason to believe that the rest of us won’t be resurrected as well. For this reason, I think that the better translation of those words are simply “believe in vain” rather than “believe feignedly.”
In regards to this, I should also say that the key to a lot of Paul’s statements in 1 Corinthians 15 is in the fact that many of the statements in the chapter are clarified by statements made later in the same chapter (such as the clarification of what verse 22 fully means being given later in verses 53-55, for example). The original readers of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians wouldn’t need the later statements to clarify things as much as we do, because they already knew the context based on already being aware of the debate over the resurrection of the dead which was taking place in their ecclesia back then, but we need to read the later verses to know this fact ourselves, because we weren’t there and wouldn’t have been aware of this fact otherwise.
So while there are (or at least have been) false brethren out there pretending to be in the body of Christ, anyone who truly understands what Paul’s evangel means and actually believes it to be true is not among them, nor are they a “feigned believer.”
And as far as the part of the verse rendered as “through which also you are saved, if you are retaining what I said in bringing the evangel to you” goes (which I bring up because it also confuses people), it’s tricky to translate perfectly, but I’m fairly sure Paul just meant there that his readers were saved (with the special salvation) if they truly believed his evangel.
So if I had to paraphrase the whole passage, I’d render it something along the lines of:
“At this point I’m reminding you, brethren, of the evangel I preach, which is what you accepted as true and which is what you stand in, and which is also what you are saved by, presuming you truly believed the evangel I preached to you, and presuming you don’t all believe it in vain [which would be the case if it isn’t actually true].”