What Does John 18:14 Mean in the King James?
Now Caiaphas was he, which gave counsel to the Jews, that it was expedient that one man should die for the people.
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
The word translated “expedient” joins “together” with “carry,” making one man’s death the means by which the people’s benefit is reckoned.
THE MEANING
The verse names a calculation that is still legible: the many are counted as preserved by the death of one. “Expedient” makes that death sound like a means to collective good, while the sentence leaves the cost, one man dying, in plain view.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
Calling a death useful does not make its human cost disappear; the verse holds the person and the claimed benefit in the same sentence.
THE ROOT
συμφέρει
sympherei
GROWS FROM
φέρ- (pher-, from φέρω, pherō) compounded with σύν (syn)
φέρω means carry or bring; σύν means together. The compound συμφέρω commonly means to contribute, benefit, or be advantageous.
“expedient” in this verse is sympherei. The word carries the sense of bringing something together for a benefit. Here, that benefit is explicitly tied to one man’s death, so the collective good cannot be separated from the life made to bear its cost.
ALSO GROWS
prospherō: bring toward; offer
προσφέρω
This compound uses the same carry-and-bring root, making visible the movement of something toward another.
anapherō: carry up; bring up
ἀναφέρω
The same root remains in a word for carrying something onward, echoing the verse’s picture of one death bearing consequences for others.
THE PATTERN
The text presents one person’s death as bearing consequences claimed for the many.
Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken.For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:THE THREAD
Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not.John 11:50 uses the same Greek συμφέρει (sympherei, “is expedient”) and nearly the same counsel. The repeated word holds the same tension: one person’s death is presented as the advantage claimed for the many.
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