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Ἰουδάς

Judas

Thayer's lists 9 entries for ‘Judas’ fuller range ↓

G2455 Strong's Greek
Ioúdas Transliteration
/ee-oo-das'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the GNT 37 appearances

Compare with another word →

About this entry

At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.

Ιουδας (Ioúdas) is a Greek name most often rendered “Judas.” It first appears in Matthew 1:2. Spanning 36 verses in 6 books, it ranks among the moderately common words of the Greek New Testament. John dominates its distribution — 9 of 36 verses. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Judah
Modern gloss
Judas
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current Thayer scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's G2455 catalogs a Greek word from the Greek New Testament.

These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Greek New Testament. What Lemma adds →

36
distinct verses
The word appears in 36 distinct verses.
6 / 27
NT books
The word appears in 6 of 27 New Testament books.
Matthew 1:2
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Matthew 1:2.
Jude 1:1
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Jude 1:1.
#397
by frequency
Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 397 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).

View all 36 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the New Testament

  • Gospels 27 · 75%
  • Acts 8 · 22%
  • Pauline Epistles 0 · 0%
  • General Epistles 1 · 3%
  • Revelation 0 · 0%

By traditional corpus

Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Some books belong to more than one corpus (Luke is in both the Gospels and the Lukan corpus, and so on), so these shares overlap and need not total 100%. Each figure is a share of the word’s 36 distinct verses.

  • Gospels 27 verses · 75%
  • Lukan (Luke–Acts) 14 verses · 39%
  • Johannine 9 verses · 25%
  • General (Catholic) Epistles 1 verse · 3%

How translations render this word

Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).

  • King James Version: Judas 32×, Juda 4×, Was the son of juda 3×
  • American Standard Version: Judas 30×, Judah 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Judas 31×, Judah 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Judas 33×, Judah 11×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders G2455 across 42 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Judas” 32×
  • “Juda” 4×
  • “Was the son of juda” 3×

Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders G2455 across 37 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Judas” 30×
  • “Judah” 2×

Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders G2455 across 35 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Judas” 31×
  • “Judah” 2×

Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders G2455 across 46 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Judas” 33×
  • “Judah” 11×

Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.


9 senses in Thayer's, in lexicon order

The 9 senses Thayer's distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.

  1. Judah or Judas = "he shall be praised"
  2. the fourth son of Jacob
  3. an unknown ancestor of Christ
  4. a man surnamed the Galilean, who at the time of the census of Quirinus, excited the revolt in Galilee, Acts 5:37
  5. a certain Jew of Damascus, Acts 9:11
  6. a prophet surnamed Barsabas, of the church at Jerusalem, Acts 15:22 , 27 , 32
  7. the apostle, Jn 14:22 , who was surnamed Lebbaeus or Thaddaeus, and according to opinion wrote the Epistle of Jude.
  8. the half-brother of Jesus, Mt. 13:55
  9. Judas Iscariot, the apostle who betrayed Jesus

Word origin

Derived from יהודה (Yᵉhûwdâh) (H3063) — Judah.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine

Of hebrew origin [ H3063 ]; Judas (that is Jehudah ) the name of ten Israelites; also of the posterity of one of them and its region : - Juda (-h -s); Jude.

— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.


Forms in the corpus

The 4 distinct written forms G2455 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.

Form Parsing Example Uses
Ἰούδας Ioúdas Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 1:3 22
Ἰούδαν Ioúdan Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine Matthew 1:2 8
Ἰούδα Ioúda Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine Mark 6:3 6
Ἰούδᾳ Ioúda Noun, Dative, Singular, Masculine John 13:26 1

Same root — word family

Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G2455, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.

Derives from

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 4 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Bible dictionary

Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Judas). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.

Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897

The Graecized form of Judah. (1.) The patriarch (Matt. 1:2, 3).

(2.) Son of Simon (John 6:71; 13:2, 26), surnamed Iscariot, i.e., a man of Kerioth (Josh. 15:25). His name is uniformly the last in the list of the apostles, as given in the synoptic (i.e., the first three) Gospels. The evil of his nature probably gradually unfolded itself till "Satan entered into him" (John 13:27), and he betrayed our Lord (18:3). Afterwards he owned his sin with "an exceeding bitter cry," and cast the money he had received as the wages of his iniquity down on the floor of the sanctuary, and "departed and went and hanged himself" (Matt. 27:5). He perished in his guilt, and "went unto his own place" (Acts 1:25). The statement in Acts 1:18 that he "fell headlong and burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out," is in no way contrary to that in Matt. 27:5. The sucide first hanged himself, perhaps over the valley of Hinnom, "and the rope giving way, or the branch to which he hung breaking, he fell down headlong on his face, and was crushed and mangled on the rocky pavement below."

Why such a man was chosen to be an apostle we know not, but it is written that "Jesus knew from the beginning who should betray him" (John 6:64). Nor can any answer be satisfactorily given to the question as to the motives that led Judas to betray his Master. "Of the motives that have been assigned we need not care to fix on any one as that which simply led him on. Crime is, for the most part, the result of a hundred motives rushing with bewildering fury through the mind of the criminal."

(3.) A Jew of Damascus (Acts 9:11), to whose house Ananias was sent. The street called "Straight" in which it was situated is identified with the modern "street of bazaars," where is still pointed out the so-called "house of Judas."

(4.) A Christian teacher, surnamed Barsabas. He was sent from Jerusalem to Antioch along with Paul and Barnabas with the decision of the council (Acts 15:22, 27, 32). He was a "prophet" and a "chief man among the brethren."

Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863

surnamed Barsabas, a leading member of the apostolic church at Jerusalem, (Acts 15:22) endued with the gift of prophesy, ver. (Acts 15:32) chosen with Silas to accompany Paul and Barnabas as delegates to the church at Antioch. (A.D. 47.) Later, Judas went back to Jerusalem.

the Greek form of the Hebrew name Judah, occurring in the LXX, and the New Testament.

+ The patriarch Judah. (Matthew 1:2,3) + A man residing at Damascus, in "the street which is called Straight," in whose house Saul of Tarsus lodged after his miraculous conversion. (Acts 9:11)

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869

Jude, same as Judah

Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.


Septuagint usage

The same Greek word Ιουδας appears 121 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 118 verses in 21 books.

121
LXX occurrences
Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
118
verses
Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
21 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 21 of the 39 Old Testament books.

Sample Septuagint occurrences

Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)

Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G2455) appears in the Greek Septuagint — showing the first 50 of 118. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.

These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G2455) in the Septuagint — not a translation of any one Hebrew word. The store carries no word-level Hebrew↔Greek alignment, so no Hebrew original is asserted here. Counts come from the recovered LXX Strong's tagging — high-frequency vocabulary is well covered, while rare or late forms may be untagged — so they reflect tagged occurrences and may slightly undercount.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.