Enquirer.
A. Certainly not, if the reader thereby gathers “the Church of God” as unfolded variously in the Epistles to the Corinthians, Ephesians, and Colossians. The meaning is clearly the assembly of Israel in the wilderness. Hence “assembly” or “congregation” would be a better rendering, as avoiding ambiguity and leaving the reader to infer from the context what assembly is meant. The word itself is capable of other applications, as in Acts 19, where it is applied to the meeting of the Ephesians. It is technically used in Greek authors for the legislative assembly to which the citizens belonged.