Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Romans 10:4
Christ is the end of the law. Stopped, or arrived at? The Greek noun means both.
Romans 10:4, in every translation this tool compares.
The end of the road. Is that where the road stops existing, or the place it was taking you all along? Same three words, and only the rest of the sentence tells you. English has this ambiguity and rarely notices it.
Because one noun decides whether the law was stopped or fulfilled, and entire theological systems have been built on each reading. Nothing else in the sentence is in doubt. If you want a single word that shows how much weight a semantic range can carry, this is it.
For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth.
The King James, ESV and NASB read end. The NIV reads culmination. The CSB reads end of the law with a footnote. The NET reads end with a substantial note.
τέλος telos · G5056
Telos means a finish, and it also means a goal, a purpose, the point at which something arrives at what it was for. English end has both senses too, which is why the rendering survives, but modern English weights it heavily toward termination.
English end still technically carries both, so no translator is forced to choose. But the reader chooses without knowing there was a choice, and most readers now hear termination.
Some English words still carry the full range of the Greek and have quietly narrowed in usage. Those are the dangerous ones, because nothing in the text looks odd enough to make you check.
End as termination makes the verse a statement that the law's era is over. End as goal makes it a statement that the law was pointing here all along and has arrived. The word carries both, the context in Romans 9 and 10 is argued both ways, and this is one of the genuine open questions in Pauline scholarship rather than a case where one side is careless.
- Telos as goal or outcome: 1 Timothy 1:5; James 5:11; 1 Peter 1:9
- Telos as termination: Matthew 24:6; Mark 3:26
- The literature on Romans 10:4 divides along exactly this line; NET translators' note at the verse summarises both
