στίγμα

From the study of Galatians 6:17

Range of meaning

From the verb stizō, "to prick, to tattoo". A stigma was a mark pricked or burned into the skin. In the Greek and Roman world such marks were put on (1) runaway or criminal slaves, as punishment and identification; (2) sometimes slaves or livestock, to show who owned them; (3) devotees of a god, to show they had been dedicated to that deity and were under its protection; and, in later Roman sources, (4) military recruits. The word always carries the idea of belonging to someone or being publicly marked out, whether in disgrace or in consecration.

Against the English

"Marks" (KJV, BSB, ESV, NIV) is accurate but faint. It can sound like bruises or blemishes, and loses the sense of a mark that says whose you are. "Brand-marks" (NASB) and "branded" (WEB, NRSV) bring out ownership, though most ancient penal stigmata were tattoos rather than hot-iron brands. "Scars" (YLT, NLT) gets the likely physical reality but drops the ownership idea, which NLT then adds back in a paraphrase.

How it drifted

Through the Latin Vulgate, which simply kept the Greek word (stigmata), the term passed into church vocabulary. After Francis of Assisi (1224) it came to mean the miraculous appearance of Christ's crucifixion wounds on hands, feet and side. Today many readers hear Paul's "stigmata" in that later sense.

Used elsewhere in the period

Herodotus (2.113) tells of an Egyptian temple of Heracles where a runaway slave who received the god's "sacred marks" (stigmata) and gave himself to the god could not be touched by his former master. Lucian (On the Syrian Goddess 59) says devotees of that goddess were all tattooed on the wrist or neck. 3 Maccabees 2:29 describes Ptolemy IV ordering Jews to be marked with the ivy-leaf of Dionysus. Jewish scripture knows the idea of a protective or ownership mark: Ezek 9:4 (the mark on the foreheads of the faithful), Isa 44:5 ("another will write on his hand, 'The LORD's'"). Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattooing. Revelation later develops the image of the seal of God and the mark of the beast (Rev 7:3; 13:16). C. P. Jones (JRS 1987) showed that Greco-Roman penal stigmata were usually tattoos.