Lexicon of Greek-English words from the Gospels-Acts Introduction On this page you will find all the Greek words used in the Gospels-Acts based on the 28th edition of Kurt Aland, their occurrences in each of the Gospels-Acts, their primary meaning in English as well as a more or less long list of verses where they appear, and finally, occasionally, a commentary on this meaning. The purpose of this page is to make known the vocabulary of each evangelist: the number of occurrences of a word used by an evangelist can be indicative of his style, his interests and his theology. For example, the verb euangelizō (to evangelize) is typical of Luke: Mt = 1; Mk = 0; Lk = 10; Jn = 0; Acts = 15; 1Jn = 0; 2Jn = 0; 3Jn = 0, knowing that Luke is also the author of the Acts of the Apostles, while the word euangelion (gospel or good news) is typical of Mark: Mt = 4; Mk = 8; Lk = 0; Jn = 0; Acts = 2; 1Jn = 0; 2Jn = 0; 3Jn = 0. Whoever is not familiar with biblical Greek can find the English term and, from that term, view all the verses where it appears, as a concordance of the Bible would do. For each Greek word, we've tried to reduce the English equivalents to a minimum, at the risk of having a rather rough sentence, in order to give a sense that the same Greek word applies to several different contexts. This page is divided into 15 columns: 1) the Greek word; 2) its transliteration; 3) its grammatical type; the number of occurrences in 4) Matthew, 5) Mark, 6) Luke, 7) John, 8) Acts, 9) 1John, 10) 2John, 11) 3John, 12) the total occurrences, 13) its basic meaning (when a single meaning cannot do justice to the word, other words will be used when translating specific verses) 14) the domain or scope of our list of verses where this word appears (we have eliminated the case of too many occurrences, and according to the number of occurrences, this domain can be limited to the gospels, as well as encompassing the whole of the Greek Bible), and finally 15) a commentary in the case where we have had the opportunity to analyze this word. It should be noted that we have included the three letters of John in the gospels, because even though these letters are not necessarily by the same author as the gospel according to John, the vocabulary and theology are so close that they are one with those of the gospel (on this subject see R.E. Brown: 1 John, 2 John, 3 John). This lexicon allows us to make some statistics.
As can be seen from the number of occurrences of words, Luke's gospel is the most voluminous book with 19,482 words, followed by Acts, and Matthew's gospel. As for single words, i.e. eliminating their repetition, it is again Luke in his gospel that displays the largest vocabulary, followed by his Acts, and finally the gospel according to Matthew. It is worth noting that John's gospel has the smallest vocabulary of the four gospels. This is not surprising, for it is often the same simple words that John repeats over and over again, so that it is the text par excellence for a beginner in the study of the Greek language. The whole of the Gospels-Acts-Johanine Letters thus contains 3,757 different words that anyone who wants to read the Gospels in the original language must know. As you'll see, we've opted for the most literal translation possible of the Greek words analyzed, at the risk of sometimes having a weird or unusual phrase. Similarly, wherever possible, we've kept the number of expressions used to translate the same Greek word to a minimum, in order to convey the Greek way of thinking, and to help memorize the English equivalents. Abbreviations This is work in progress, as the ultimate goal to have all words documented List of entries in alphabetical order
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