What Does 1 Corinthians 8:13 Mean in the King James?
Wherefore, if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.
The analysis reads the King James wording.
King James Version The King James Version, first published in 1611. Selah Verse shows the standard text.
THE KEY
“Offend” carries the image of setting a stumbling block in another person’s path, so the verse frames restraint as refusing to become the cause of someone else’s fall.
THE MEANING
A permitted choice can still become a tripwire in someone else’s path. Your freedom remains real, yet you can release its exercise so another person is not pulled into a fall. The repeated verb connects your brother’s stumbling with your refusal to cause it.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The belief that a choice is harmless simply because it is permitted dissolves here: its effect on another person matters too.
THE ROOT
σκανδαλίζω
skandalizō
GROWS FROM
σκανδαλ-
skandal-
A snare or stumbling block set in another’s path.
Here “offend” carries the image of making someone stumble, not merely bruising their feelings. The verb repeats for both the brother’s stumbling and Paul’s refusal, binding the exercise of freedom to whether it trips another person.
ALSO GROWS
skándalon: A snare or stumbling block.
σκάνδαλον
This noun makes the hidden image concrete: what causes the stumble is pictured as an obstacle in the path.
skandalismós: A stumbling or occasion of stumbling.
σκανδαλισμός
This related noun names the result or occasion of the stumble, showing how an action can become a cause of another’s fall.
THE PATTERN
A person’s freedom is measured by whether it becomes a stumbling block in another’s path.
Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumblingblock before the blind, but shalt fear thy God: I am the LORD.It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor any thing whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak.THE THREAD
But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.The Greek verb σκανδαλίζω (skandalizō, “cause to stumble”) appears in both verses. Jesus names the gravity of causing a little one to fall; here Paul responds by refusing even an ordinary freedom if it would make him that cause.
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