StrongerBible

eirēnopoios

εἰρηνοποιός

GreekG1518“peacemaker”

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Mat 5:9
Compound of
eirēnēεἰρήνηpeace93G1515
poieōποιέωto do/make: do579G4160
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradei-ray-no-poy-OSadjective

What eirēnopoios means

a peacemaker: one who actively works to bring peace and reconcile people who are at odds.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This word appears only once in the New Testament, in Jesus' seventh blessing: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God" (Matthew 5:9). It is built from the word for peace (εἰρήνη) joined to the word for making or doing, so at its core it names a person who makes peace, not merely a person who happens to be calm or easygoing.

That active sense is the heart of it, and it is worth underlining because the older reading often softened it into a temperament. The blessing is not on people who keep their heads down and avoid a fight. It is on people who step into conflict and do the work of reconciling:

  • bringing estranged people back together
  • mending broken relationships
  • healing division

One scholar put it well: this is not someone who quietly loves peace but someone who labors to bring it about.

The peace in view is the rich biblical idea of wholeness and right relationship, not just the absence of fighting. So peacemaking is repair, not mere quiet. And the reason such people are called children of God is that they are doing God's own work: in this same tradition God himself is described as a peacemaker, so those who make peace take after their Father.

Mat 5:9

Disputed

What background and force the blessing on "peacemakers" carries: an inherited Jewish ethical ideal of reconciling people, a pointed challenge to revolutionary nationalism, or a deliberate confiscation of an honor that Rome claimed for the emperor.

  • majorityIt is primarily interpersonal and ethical, drawing on the rabbinic ideal of loving and pursuing peace and on Matthew's own emphasis on reconciliation; the saying blesses those who reconcile estranged people.; W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew (ICC), vol. 1 (1988), 457-459; Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary, rev. ed., Hermeneia (2007), 198-199; R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (2007), 168-169
  • minorityIt is a rejection of Jewish revolutionary nationalism, defending why the early Christian community did not join the war against Rome.; M. Eugene Boring, "The Gospel of Matthew," in The New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 8 (1995), 180; Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 1-13, WBC 33A (1993), 94
  • minorityIt is a counter-imperial claim that confiscates from Caesar a title and an honor (peacemaker, son of god) and relocates them in Jesus' disciples.; Hans Windisch, "Friedensbringer-Gottessöhne," Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 24 (1925): 240-260; Klaus Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ (1987); Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (2000), 134-137

What scholars say about eirēnopoios

The lexical evidence is decisive and uncontested: the morphology of the compound (the noun for peace governed by an agent-forming second element from poieo) fixes the active sense, and BDAG, LSJ, Louw-Nida (Domain 40, Reconciliation), Spicq, and EDNT all give only "one who makes peace, reconciler," excluding the older Thayer-style dispositional gloss ("peaceable, pacific"). The substantive does not occur in the Septuagint, though the cognate verb appears at Proverbs 10:10 LXX; the conceptual weight rests on shalom (rendered eirene some 250 times), whose range is wholeness and covenantal well-being, not mere cessation of war (Foerster, TDNT). Philo names God himself eirenopoios (Spec. Leg. 2.192), the closest Jewish-theological backdrop to the apodosis "children of God," and the rabbinic ideal of pursuing peace (m. Avot 1.12) is the controlling ethical horizon for most commentators (Davies-Allison, Luz, France, Hagner). Outside Jewish sources the term is politico-diplomatic from Xenophon onward and crystallizes as imperial titulature (Pacator Orbis) firmly only for Commodus (191/192 CE), a century after Matthew; the empire-critical reading (Windisch, Wengst, Carter) therefore rests on the cluster of contested imperial titles rather than this single token. The interpretive debate concerns horizon and force, not lexical meaning.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • F. W. Danker, rev., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (BDAG), 3rd ed. (2000), s.v. εἰρηνοποιόςlexicon
  • H. G. Liddell, R. Scott, H. S. Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon (LSJ), 9th ed. (1996), s.v. εἰρηνοποιόςlexicon
  • J. P. Louw and E. A. Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, 2nd ed. (1989), §40.4lexicon
  • C. Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (1994), 1:424-425, s.v. εἰρηνοποιόςdictionary
  • W. Foerster, "εἰρήνη κτλ.," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 2:400-420dictionary
  • W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel According to Saint Matthew (ICC), vol. 1 (1988), 457-459commentary
  • Ulrich Luz, Matthew 1-7: A Commentary, rev. ed., Hermeneia (2007), 198-199commentary
  • R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (2007), 168-169commentary
  • Donald A. Hagner, Matthew 1-13, WBC 33A (1993), 94commentary
  • Hans Windisch, "Friedensbringer-Gottessöhne," Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 24 (1925): 240-260article
  • Klaus Wengst, Pax Romana and the Peace of Jesus Christ (1987)monograph
  • Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading (2000), 134-137monograph
  • Hans Dieter Betz, The Sermon on the Mount, Hermeneia (1995), 137-142commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of εἰρηνοποιός

nominative m p

εἰρηνοποιοί

Mat 5:9