4:1 One should think about us this way—as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.

The word ‘servants’, ‘hyperetas’, is thought to be derived from ‘eresso’, ‘to row’ and ‘hypo’, ‘below’, and thus to mean (‘literally’) ‘under-rower’.  Lay preachers and popular writers tend to make much of this.  Wiersbe, for example, writes:

‘The word translated ministers is literally “under-rowers.” It described the slaves who rowed the huge Roman galleys. “We are not the captains of the ship,” said Paul, “but only the galley slaves who are under orders.’

But by the time of the NT the word had taken on a broader meaning.  In Lk 4:20, for example, it is used of the attendant in the local synagogue.  The word is never used in the sense of ‘under-rower’ in the NT, nor (with one possible exception) in the whole of classical literature. “The ‘hyperetes’ in the New Testament is a servant, and often there is little if anything to distinguish him from a ‘diakonos’” (Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, 29). To define the meaning of a word simply from the derivation of its component parts is to be guilty of the ‘root fallacy’ (Carson). Such reasoning would be forced to say that a pineapple is ‘literally’ an apple that grows on a pine tree, or that a dandelion is ‘literally’ a lion’s tooth.

According to Barrett, there is ‘little difference’ in meaning between ‘hyperetes‘ and ‘diakonos‘.  In both cases, the ‘servant…has no significance of his own; the work done is not his but his master’s’.