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.
martus
Witness. The English word martyr is the same Greek word, after what happened to the witnesses.
Acts 1:8, in every translation this tool compares.
He gave evidence. Nothing in that says anything about dying. Now imagine enough witnesses being killed that the word for witness starts to mean the killing.
Because the shift from witness to martyr happened in English and in church history rather than in Greek, and it is one of the cleanest examples of a word acquiring its meaning from events.
Every version reads witness. Martyr appears only where the context is death, as at Revelation 17:6.
μάρτυς martus · G3144
Martus is a witness in the plain legal sense. The specialised meaning of one who dies for the testimony develops in the second century, and English borrowed the later sense as a separate word.
English now has two words from one Greek word, which is unusual and means the pair looks like a coincidence rather than a history.
When English has two words from one original, the second one usually records something that happened.
Witness is the majority rendering throughout the New Testament.
- martus in the legal sense: Matthew 18:16; Acts 1:8
- The shift visible at Revelation 2:13; 17:6
- English martyr borrowed from the later ecclesiastical sense
