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.
John 11:3, 5, 36
Both love-words, one chapter, the same relationship. Whatever they are doing, they are not ranking it.
John 11:3, in every translation this tool compares.
If someone calls the same person my mate in one sentence and my friend two sentences later, you do not conclude the friendship got upgraded. Same thing here, except a lot of sermons draw exactly that conclusion.
Because this is the control experiment for the whole agapao-phileo argument. One chapter, one relationship, both verbs. If you learn only one passage on the love words, learn the one that tests the claim rather than the one that launched it.
Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick. … Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. … Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him!
No English version distinguishes them, and almost no study Bible notes that both appear here.
φιλέω phileo · G5368 / ἀγαπάω agapao · G25
Verse 3 uses phileo, on the sisters' lips. Verse 5 uses agapao, in the narrator's voice, about the same three people. Verse 36 uses phileo again, on the crowd's lips. One relationship, one chapter, both verbs.
English merges the two, so an English reader cannot see the alternation at all, and therefore cannot see that it does not line up with any hierarchy.
Before accepting that two words rank each other, find a passage where both are used of the same thing. If the ranking survives that, it is real. Here it does not.
There is no dispute in the text. The dispute is in the pulpit, and this chapter is the cleanest evidence against the claim that agapao is the higher love and phileo the lesser one. It is the same evidence that John 21 supplies, in a different book of the same Gospel.
- John 11:3 phileis; 11:5 egapa; 11:36 ephilei
- D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies, on the agapao/phileo distinction
