StrongerBible

planē

πλάνη

GreekG4106“error, deceit, ...”

Appears 10 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Mat 27:64Rom 1:27Eph 4:141Th 2:32Th 2:11Jas 5:202Pe 2:182Pe 3:171Jn 4:6Jud 1:11
Root family
Word studyPLAH-naynoun

What planē means

straying from the truth: the wrong road a person ends up on, and the misleading that puts them there

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

Underneath this word is a picture of travel gone wrong. In ordinary Greek it named a wandering or a roaming about, the state of someone who is no longer on the road they meant to be on. Every New Testament use keeps that picture but moves it onto moral and religious ground: the road in question is the one that leads to God, and to be off it is not a small thing. James can speak of turning a sinner back from the wandering of his way and so saving a soul from death.

The word looks in two directions at once, and English cannot follow it. It can name what has happened to someone, that they are astray, and it can name what someone is doing to others, that they are pulling them off course. Our language needs "error" for the first and "deception" or "fraud" for the second, but the Greek holds both, because they are one road seen from either end. Which end is in view has to be judged from the sentence, and several verses are argued over for exactly that reason. The related verb πλανάω has the same double reach, and the person who does the leading astray gets his own word (πλάνος), which is what the chief priests call Jesus in the verse just before they call the resurrection report a fraud.

So across the New Testament the word takes three shapes:

  • the wrong road a person is already walking
  • a deliberate work of misleading other people
  • a whole power at work against the truth

That third shape is the most striking. In 1 John it stands opposite the truth as a rival spirit, and in 2 Thessalonians it is a force let loose on people who have refused to love the truth. There the word is close to naming one side of a conflict rather than one person's mistake, and it stands against ἀλήθεια the way darkness stands against light.

Nuances

1athe wrong road a person is on: a life or a belief that has gone off course from the truth, with the ruin that follows it
Rom 1:271Th 2:3Jas 5:202Pe 2:182Pe 3:17Jud 1:11
1ba deliberate work of misleading other people: a fraud, a hoax, a scheme aimed at pulling people off course
TranslatabilityApproximate
Mat 27:64Eph 4:14
1cerror as a power at work against the truth, larger than any one person's mistake
2Th 2:111Jn 4:6

What scholars say about planē

The classical baseline is spatial: LSJ gives a wandering, a roaming, and then the transferred senses of going astray, error and deceit, a range already fixed in Attic prose. BDAG accordingly divides the New Testament material in two, the state of being led astray (wandering from the path of truth, error, delusion) and the act of leading astray (deception, deceit), and the whole exegetical difficulty of the word lies in distributing the ten occurrences between them. Braun's TDNT article stresses that the Septuagint and the Jewish apocalyptic literature had already moralized the term, so that straying is not a neutral misstep but apostasy, and that in the dualistic texts it hardens into a designation for the sphere opposed to God. Trench, comparing it with ἀπάτη and δόλος, locates its distinctive force in the objective wandering rather than in the subjective trick. Three verses carry live disagreement. At 1 Thessalonians 2:3 Malherbe (Anchor Bible 32B) reads the two prepositional phrases governed by ἐκ as naming the source and character of Paul's preaching against the sophistic charge, so that πλάνη is delusion in the message rather than deceit practised on hearers, δόλος already covering method; commentators who take the triad as a single denial of charlatanry read it actively. At Jude 11 Bauckham (WBC 50) sets the phrase within the developed Jewish portrait of Balaam as one whose greed both ruined him and ensnared Israel, which allows either reading. At 1 John 4:6 the pairing of the spirit of truth with the spirit of error is widely compared with the two spirits of the Qumran Community Rule (1QS 3:13-4:26); Brown (Anchor Bible 30) treats the parallel as decisive for the dualistic background while cautioning that John's spirits are not simply the sectarian ones. On the meaning of the word itself there is no dispute, only on its direction in particular contexts.

Sources

  • LSJ, A Greek-English Lexicon, s.v. πλάνηlexicon
  • BDAG, 3rd ed. (2000), s.v. πλάνηlexicon
  • Louw and Nida, Greek-English Lexicon Based on Semantic Domains, s.v. πλάνηlexicon
  • H. Braun, 'πλανάω, πλάνη,' TDNT 6:228-53theological-dictionary
  • M. Silva (ed.), NIDNTTE, s.v. πλανάωtheological-dictionary
  • R. C. Trench, Synonyms of the New Testamentmonograph
  • A. J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians, Anchor Bible 32B (2000)commentary
  • R. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter, WBC 50 (1983)commentary
  • R. E. Brown, The Epistles of John, Anchor Bible 30 (1982)commentary
  • A. T. Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC 42 (1990)commentary

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

All attested forms of πλάνη

genitive f s

πλάνης

Rom 1:27, Eph 4:14, 1Th 2:3, 2Th 2:11, Jas 5:20, 1Jn 4:6

dative f s

πλάνῃ

2Pe 2:18, 2Pe 3:17, Jud 1:11

nominative f s

πλάνη

Mat 27:64