Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
ekklesia
Church. A civic word for a called-out assembly, with no religious content of its own.
Matthew 16:18, in every translation this tool compares.
The assembly voted. That is a description of people gathered, not of a building they gathered in. English still has the plain word and reserves a different one for religion.
Because English church means a building or a denomination, and the Greek word meant a town meeting. Everything institutional that the English word carries was added later.
Every version reads church. A few render assembly or congregation in Old Testament quotations.
ἐκκλησία ekklesia · G1577
Ekklesia was the citizen assembly of a Greek city, summoned to decide public business. The Septuagint uses it for the assembly of Israel. It appears in Acts 19 of an ordinary and rather disorderly civic crowd.
English church comes from a different Greek word entirely, kuriakon, belonging to the Lord, and has meant a building for most of its life in English.
When the English word and the Greek word have different etymologies, the English word is telling you about English history rather than about the text.
Church is universal in English versions and no major translation has departed from it.
- ekklesia of a civic crowd: Acts 19:32, 39, 41
- ekklesia for the assembly of Israel in the Septuagint: Deuteronomy 31:30
- English church from kuriakon, not from ekklesia
