pisteuō

πιστεύω

GreekG4100“believe, trust, ...”

Appears 245 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 9:28Mat 21:22Mat 21:25Mat 21:32 (3×)Mat 24:23Mat 24:26Mrk 1:15Mrk 9:23 (2×)Mrk 9:24Mrk 11:24Mrk 11:31Mrk 13:21Mrk 16:13Mrk 16:14Luk 8:12Luk 8:13Luk 20:5Luk 22:67Luk 24:25Jhn 1:7Jhn 1:12Jhn 1:50Jhn 2:11Jhn 2:22Jhn 2:23Jhn 3:12Jhn 3:15Jhn 3:16Jhn 3:18 (2×)Jhn 3:36Jhn 4:39Jhn 4:41Jhn 4:42Jhn 4:48Jhn 4:50Jhn 4:53Jhn 5:24Jhn 5:38Jhn 5:44Jhn 5:47Jhn 6:35Jhn 6:36Jhn 6:40Jhn 6:47Jhn 6:64 (2×)Jhn 7:5Jhn 7:31Jhn 7:38Jhn 7:39Jhn 7:48

Root family

peithōπείθωto persuade55G3982

Word studyResearch-gradepis-TYOO-ohverb

What pisteuō means

to believe: to take a message as true and lean one's whole self on the person it is about, above all on God and on Jesus

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This is the New Testament's central word for how a person responds to the good news. It is not split between head and heart. At one end it means accepting that something is so (that God raised Jesus, that God is one), and at the other it means handing yourself over to a person you have decided is reliable. The same verb carries both, because for the first Christians you could not really trust a person you did not also hold to be who they claimed to be, and you could not say you held Jesus to be Lord while keeping your weight off him.

The shades below track the small words the writers put after the verb.

When it is followed by a statement ("believe that..."), the accent falls on accepting something as true.
When it is followed by "in" or "on" a person, the accent falls on resting yourself on that person, which is the dominant note when the object is God or Christ.
And used by itself, with no object at all, it had become almost a label: "those who believed" simply meant the Christians.

The early church did not invent this range. The Greek translation of the Old Testament had already used this verb to render the Hebrew word for Abraham's steady reliance on God (אמן), and Greek and Roman life used the related noun (πίστις) for the trust and good faith that held households, treaties, and loyalties together. So when the New Testament writers reached for this verb, they reached for a word that already meant a relationship of trust, and they aimed it at Jesus.

Because the word reaches from bare assent to self-surrender, no single English word captures it. "Believe" leans cognitive, "trust" leans relational, and the text keeps both in play.

Nuances

1ato accept a statement or report as true, to give it credence

TranslatabilityApproximate

Mrk 11:23Luk 1:20Jhn 2:22Jhn 5:47Act 24:14Rom 10:91Th 4:142Th 1:101Ti 3:16Heb 11:6Jas 2:19 (2×)1Jn 5:1

1bto trust a person and rely on them, above all to entrust oneself to God or to Christ

Jhn 1:12Jhn 3:16Jhn 3:18 (2×)Jhn 6:35Jhn 11:25Jhn 14:1 (2×)Act 16:31Act 16:34Rom 4:3Rom 4:5Rom 9:33Rom 10:11

1cto be a believer, to come to faith, used with no object as a near-label for becoming a Christian

Jhn 4:41Act 2:44Act 4:32Act 5:14Act 13:39Act 13:48Act 18:8 (2×)Act 19:2Rom 13:111Co 3:51Co 15:21Co 15:11

to entrust something to someone, or (when the subject is the receiver) to be put in charge of it as a trust

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is the older, everyday business sense of the word, the one Greek writers had used for centuries: to commit something valuable into a reliable person's keeping. Here the believer is not the one trusting; the believer is the one being trusted with a charge.

Paul uses it of himself and the other apostles: God has handed them the good news as a deposit to guard and pass on, and it speaks of Israel being given the very words of God to keep. The accent is on responsibility received, not on a decision to trust, which is why a different English word, "entrust," fits these places and not the others.

Luk 16:11Jhn 2:24Rom 3:21Co 9:17Gal 2:71Th 2:41Ti 1:11Tit 1:3

What scholars say about pisteuō

The standard lexicons (BDAG, Louw-Nida, Spicq, the TDNT, the EDNT, and Silva's NIDNTTE) converge on a range running from "consider true, give credence to" through "trust, entrust oneself to" to the absolute "be a believer," plus the older active and passive "entrust X to Y / be entrusted with X." Rudolf Bultmann's TDNT article framed the twentieth-century habit of contrasting Greek intellectual belief with Hebrew personal trust, a binary that recent work has dismantled. Teresa Morgan argues that trust and good faith, not propositional belief, dominated the first-century Greek and Roman field of the word, while Matthew Bates presses for "allegiance" and Nijay Gupta reads the term as polymorphous, holding belief, loyalty, and reliance together. The grammatical patterns carry much of the freight: the construction "believe in/into" a person is a distinctive New Testament idiom (heaviest in John) for personal entrustment, shaped by the Greek Old Testament's rendering of the Hebrew word for trust.

Where scholars disagree about pisteuō

Scholars disagree about which sense sits at the center of the New Testament's use of this verb. The mid-twentieth-century reading made it bare intellectual belief; the field has moved away from that. Teresa Morgan argues the core is relational trust, of which loyalty is one register; Matthew Bates argues that for salvation it is best rendered "allegiance" or fidelity to Jesus as king; Nijay Gupta holds the term is polymorphous, braiding belief, loyalty, and reliance together; and Francis Watson and others answer that "belief" remains the primary category, pointing to John's heavy use of the verb and Paul's statement that confession is tied to believing that God raised Jesus. No settled majority has emerged.

contestedrelational trust is at the center, with loyalty as one register of it; Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith (Oxford University Press 2015); Teresa Morgan, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust (Oxford University Press 2022)
minorityfor salvation the verb is best rendered "allegiance," fidelity to Jesus as king; Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone (Baker Academic 2017)
contestedthe term is polymorphous, holding belief, loyalty, and reliance together; Nijay K. Gupta, Paul and the Language of Faith (Eerdmans 2020)
contested"belief" remains the primary New Testament category; Francis Watson, "Roman Faith and Christian Faith," New Testament Studies 64.2 (2018): 243-247

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

BDAG, s.v. πιστεύωlexicon
Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, §§31.35, 31.85, 31.102lexicon
Ceslas Spicq, Theological Lexicon of the New Testament (Hendrickson 1994), 3:110-116lexicon
Rudolf Bultmann, "πιστεύω κτλ.," Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Eerdmans 1968), 6:174-228theological-dictionary
Moisés Silva, New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis (Zondervan 2014), 3:759-778theological-dictionary
Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford University Press 2015)monograph
Teresa Morgan, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust (Oxford University Press 2022)monograph
Matthew W. Bates, Salvation by Allegiance Alone: Rethinking Faith, Works, and the Gospel of Jesus the King (Baker Academic 2017)monograph
Nijay K. Gupta, Paul and the Language of Faith (Eerdmans 2020)monograph
Benjamin Schliesser, Abraham's Faith in Romans 4 (WUNT 2/224, Mohr Siebeck 2007)monograph
Dennis Lindsay, Josephus and Faith: Πίστις and Πιστεύειν as Faith Terminology in the Writings of Flavius Josephus and in the New Testament (Brill 1993)monograph
Will Timmins, "A Faith Unlike Abraham's: Matthew Bates on Salvation by Allegiance Alone," Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 61.3 (2018): 595-615journal-article
Francis Watson, "Roman Faith and Christian Faith," New Testament Studies 64.2 (2018): 243-247journal-article

What pisteuō means

to believe: to take a message as true and lean one's whole self on the person it is about, above all on God and on Jesus

Nuances

to entrust something to someone, or (when the subject is the receiver) to be put in charge of it as a trust

Related words

The English words used to translate pisteuō

How pisteuō differs from similar Greek words

pisteuō in the other biblical languages

What scholars say about pisteuō

Where scholars disagree about pisteuō

Sources

All attested forms of πιστεύω

present active participle nominative m s

aorist active indicative 3p

aorist active indicative 3s

present active indicative 2p

aorist active subjunctive 2p

present active participle dative m p

present active imperative 2p

present active indicative 2s

aorist active indicative 2p

aorist active infinitive

aorist active participle nominative m p

present active participle nominative m p

present active indicative 1p

present active indicative 1s

present active infinitive

aorist active subjunctive 3p

imperfect active indicative 3p

present active indicative 3p

present active participle accusative m p

present active participle dative m s

present active participle genitive m p

aorist active participle dative m p

aorist active subjunctive 1p

present active indicative 3s

aorist active imperative 2s

aorist active indicative 1p

aorist active indicative 2s

aorist active participle nominative m s

aorist active subjunctive 1s

aorist active subjunctive 2s

aorist passive indicative 1s

aorist passive indicative 3s

future active indicative 2p

imperfect active indicative 2p

perfect active indicative 1p

perfect active indicative 1s

perfect active indicative 3s

perfect active participle genitive m p

perfect active participle nominative m p

perfect passive indicative 1s