What Does Acts 11:8 Mean?
But I said, Not so, Lord, for nothing common or unclean has ever entered my mouth.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
But I said, Not so, Lord: for nothing common or unclean hath at any time entered into my mouth.THE KEY
The sentence keeps “common” and “unclean” distinct: what is shared or ordinary is not automatically impure.
THE MEANING
The boundary is stated without exception: nothing common or unclean has entered the mouth. “Common” and “unclean” name distinct judgments, making visible the line drawn around what is received.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the assumption that “common” and “unclean” mean the same thing.
THE ROOT
κοινόν
koinon
GROWS FROM
κοιν-
koin-
Shared, common, belonging to what is held in common.
The same word family can name ordinary or shared things and the act of treating something as common or profane. The word’s connection to sharing remains visible beneath its use as a purity judgment.
ALSO GROWS
koinōnia: Sharing in common, participation.
κοινωνία
It shows that “common” carries the idea of what is shared, not only what is considered profane.
koinoō: To make common, or to treat as profane or defiled.
κοινόω
This branch shows how something shared or ordinary can become a judgment about purity.
ἀκάθαρτον
akatharton
GROWS FROM
καθαρ-
kathar-
Clean or pure; with the privative ἀ-, not clean.
“Unclean” is formed as the absence of clean: the word itself points toward the condition from which cleansing removes. Set beside “common,” it names a separate kind of boundary.
ALSO GROWS
katharos: Clean, pure.
καθαρός
It gives the positive state against which “unclean” is formed.
katharizō: To cleanse or make clean.
καθαρίζω
It connects the word for uncleanness to the action that removes it.
THE PATTERN
Purity claims draw a line around what crosses inward and how it is judged.
To part between the unclean and the clean, and between the beast that may be eaten and the beast that may not be eaten.There is nothing from outside a man, entering into him, that can make him common. But the things coming out of a man, those are the things that make the man common.And the voice spoke to him again the second time, What God has cleansed, do not make common.THE THREAD
And the voice spoke to him again the second time, What God has cleansed, do not make common.The same Greek word for “common” returns in the answer: κοινόν (koinon). The shared root makes the exchange turn on the name given to what has been cleansed.
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