These words occur together
When we seek more accurately to distinguish them, and to detect the exact notion which each conveys, ἀγράμματος need not occupy us long. It corresponds exactly to our ‘illiterate’ (γράμματα μὴ μεμαθηκώς,
But ἰδιώτης is a word of far wider range, of uses far more complex and subtle. Its primary idea, the point from which, so to speak, etymologically it starts, is that of the private man, occupying himself with his own things (τὰ ἴδια), as contrasted with the political; the man unclothed with office, as set over against and distinguished from him who bears some office in the state. But lying as it did very deep in the Greek mind, being one of the strongest convictions there, that in public life the true education of the man and the citizen consisted, it could not fail that the word should presently be tinged with something of contempt and scorn. The ἰδιώτης, staying at home while others were facing honorable toil, οἰκουρός, as Plutarch calls him (Phil. cum Princip.), a ‘house-dove,’ as our ancestors slightingly named him, unexercised in business, unaccustomed to deal with his fellow-men, is unpractical; and thus the word is joined with ἀπράγμων by Plato (Rep. x. 620 c; cf. Plutarch, De Virt. et Vit. 4), with ἄπρακτος by Plutarch (Phil. cum Princ. 1), who sets him over against the πολιτικὸς καὶ πρακτικός. But more than this, he is often boorish, and thus ἰδιώτης is linked with ἄγροικος (Chrysostom, in 1 Ep. Cor. Hom. 3), with ἀπαίδευτος (Plutarch, Arist. et Men. Comp. 1), and other words such as these.1
The history of ἰδιώτης by no means stops here, though we have followed it as far as is absolutely necessary to explain its association (
For the matter immediately before us it will be sufficient to say that when the Pharisees recognized Peter and John as men ἀγράμματοι καὶ ἰδιῶται, in the first word they expressed more the absence in them of book-learning, and, confining as they would have done this to the Old Testament, the ἱερὰ γράμματα, and to the glosses of their own doctors upon these, their lack of acquaintance with such lore as St. Paul had learned at the feet of Gamaliel; in the second their want of that education which men insensibly acquire by mingling with those who have important affairs to transact, and by taking their own share in the transaction of such. Setting aside that higher training of the heart and the intellect which is obtained by direct communion with God and his truth, no doubt books and public life, literature and politics, are the two most effectual organs of mental and moral training which the world has at its command—the second, as needs hardly be said, immeasurably more effectual than the first. He is ἀγράμματος who has not shared in the first, ἰδιώτης who has had no part in the second.
1 There is an excellent discussion on the successive meanings of ἰδιώτης in Bishop Horsley’s Tracts in Controversy with Dr. Priestley, Appendix, Disquisition Second, pp. 475–485. Our English ‘idiot’ has also an instructive history. This quotation from Jeremy Taylor (Dissuasive from Popery, part ii. b. i. § 1) will show how it was used two hundred years ago: ‘S. Austin affirmed that the plain places of Scripture are sufficient to all laics, and all idiots or private persons.’ See my Select Glossary s. v. for other examples of the same use of the word.
[The following Strong's numbers apply to this section:G2399,G62.]
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