Ἀλφαῖος
Alphaeus
Thayer's lists 3 entries for ‘Alphaeus’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where G256 appears — 5 distinct verses across 4 books. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Greek form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Greek New Testament; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences of this word are not indexed here.
Matthew 1 verse
Mark 2 verses
- Mark 2:14 Ἁλφαίου n gen sg masc As he passed by, he saw Levi, the son of Alphaeus, sitting at the tax office, and he said to him, "Follow me." And he arose and followed him.
- Mark 3:18 Ἁλφαίου n gen sg masc Andrew; Philip; Bartholomew; Matthew; Thomas; James, the son of Alphaeus; Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot;
Luke 1 verse
Acts 1 verse
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.
At its core, Αλφαιος (Alphaîos) means “Alphaeus.” The Greek New Testament uses it only 5 verses. The word gravitates to Mark (40%), then Matthew and Luke. It first appears in Matthew 10:3. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G256 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 4 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 4 of 27 New Testament books.
- #1,648
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Greek words (rank 1,648 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
By section of the New Testament
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 5 distinct verses.
- Gospels 4 verses · 80%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 40%
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: Son of alphaeus 3×, Alphaeus 2×
- American Standard Version: Son of alphaeus 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Alphaeus 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Alphaeus 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G256 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G256 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G256 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G256 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in Thayer's
The 3 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.
- Alphaeus = "changing"
- The father of Levi the publican ( Mk 2:14 )
- The father of James the less, so called, one of the apostles
Word origin
Derived from חלף (Cheleph) (H2501) — Heleph.
Of hebrew origin (compare [ H2501 ]); Alpheus an Israelite : - Alpheus.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms G256 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ἀλφαίου Alphaíou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 10:3 | 3 |
| Ἁλφαίου Halphaíou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | Mark 2:14 | 2 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G256, 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 → 2 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 (Alphaeus). 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
(1.) The father of James the Less, the apostle and writer of the epistle (Matt. 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13), and the husband of Mary (John 19:25). The Hebrew form of this name is Cleopas, or Clopas (q.v.).
(2.) The father of Levi, or Matthew (Mark 2:14).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(changing) the father of the apostle James the Less, (Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:15; Acts 1:13) and husband of Mary. (John 19:25) [Mary] In this latter place he is called Clopas (not, as in the Authorized Version, Cleophas).
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
