μαρτυρία
testimony
‘testimony’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G3141 appears in the Book of Acts — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Acts
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.
“testimony” is the headline sense of the Greek noun μαρτυρια (martyría). First canonically at Mark 14:55, it enters the text early. With 33 verses in 9 books, it is a moderately common word in the Greek New Testament. It concentrates in John, which alone accounts for 42% of its uses. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. See the sense tree, 33-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3141 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 →
- 33
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 33 distinct verses.
- 9 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 9 of 27 New Testament books.
- #397
- by frequency
- Top 500 most frequent Greek words (rank 397 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 33 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- John 14 verses 42%
- Revelation 8 verses 24%
- Mark 3 verses 9%
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 33 distinct verses.
- Johannine 26 verses · 79%
- Gospels 18 verses · 55%
- Revelation 8 verses · 24%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 4 verses · 12%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 2 verses · 6%
- Pauline corpus 2 verses · 6%
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: Witness 15×, Testimony 14×, Record 7×
- American Standard Version: Witness 23×, Testimony 12×
- Berean Standard Bible: Testimony 35×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Testimony 35×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3141 across 37 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3141 across 37 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 G3141 across 37 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 G3141 across 39 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in Thayer's
The 2 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.
- the office committed to the prophets of testifying concerning future events
- what one testifies, testimony, i.e. before a judge
Word origin
Derived from μαρτυς (mártys) (G3144) — witness.
From G3144 ; evidence given (judicially or generally): - record report testimony witness.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G3141 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μαρτυρίαν martyrían | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Feminine | Mark 14:55 | 19 |
| μαρτυρία martyría | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Feminine | Mark 14:59 | 15 |
| μαρτυρίας martyrías | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Feminine | Luke 22:71 | 2 |
| μαρτυρίαι martyríai | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Feminine | Mark 14:56 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3141, 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
Shares the same root
- μαρτυρεω martyréō G3140 to testify
- μαρτυριον martýrion G3142 testimony
- μαρτυρομαι martýromai G3143 to call to witness
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word μαρτυρια appears 6 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 6 verses in 5 books.
- 6
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 6
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Genesis 31:47 μαρτυρία
- Exodus 20:16 μαρτυρία
- Deuteronomy 5:20 μαρτυρία
- Psalms 18:8 μαρτυρία
- Proverbs 12:19 μαρτυρία
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G3141) appears in the Greek Septuagint. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context; the Greek form is the matched word — the English is not keyword-highlighted.
- Genesis 31:47 μαρτυρία Laban called it Jegar Sahadutha, but Jacob called it Galeed.
- Exodus 20:16 μαρτυρία "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
- Deuteronomy 5:20 μαρτυρία "Neither shall you give false testimony against your neighbor.
- Psalms 18:8 μαρτυρία Smoke went out of his nostrils. Consuming fire came out of his mouth. Coals were kindled by it.
- Proverbs 12:19 μαρτυρία Truth's lips will be established forever, But a lying tongue is only momentary.
- Proverbs 25:18 μαρτυρία A man who gives false testimony against his neighbor Is like a club, a sword, or a sharp arrow.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G3141) 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.
