Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
"The quick and the dead" means the fast and the dead
"Quick" in 1611 meant "alive"; the same root survives today in "quicken" and "the quick of your fingernail."
Acts 10:42, in every translation this tool compares.
The phrase appears in the Apostles' Creed tradition and directly in Scripture: "who shall judge the quick and the dead" (2 Timothy 4:1, KJV; also Acts 10:42, 1 Peter 4:5). Modern "quick" means fast; the 1611 sense is "alive," from the same Old English root that survives today in "quicken" (to bring to life) and the sensitive living tissue under a fingernail ("the quick") that stings when it's cut.
The phrase simply means "the living and the dead," everyone, not merely people who happen to be moving fast, which is exactly what modern translations render it as.
