μαρτύρομαι
to call to witness
‘to call to witness’ 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Present
- Ongoing or general action in present time (imperfective aspect).
Voice
- Middle or Passive deponent
- Middle/passive in form but active in meaning.
Mood
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
- Participle
- A verbal adjective (“writing,” “having written”).
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
Person
- 1st person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Every verse where G3143 appears in the Book of Ephesians — 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.
Ephesians
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.
μαρτυρομαι (martýromai) is a Greek verb most often rendered “to call to witness.” It is rare — just 5 verses in the entire Greek New Testament. It concentrates in Acts, which alone accounts for 40% of its uses. It first appears in Acts 20:26. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G3143 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.
- Pauline corpus 3 verses · 60%
- 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: I take 1×, I testify 1×, Record 1×
- American Standard Version: Testify 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: I testify 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: I testify 2×, Testifying 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G3143 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G3143 across 3 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G3143 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 G3143 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 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.
- to cite a witness, bring forward a witness, call to witness
- to conjure, beseech as in God's name, exhort solemnly
Word origin
Derived from μαρτυς (mártys) (G3144) — witness.
Middle voice from G3144 ; to be adduced as a witness that is (figuratively) to obtest (in affirmation or exhortation): - take to record testify.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G3143 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| μαρτύρομαι martýromai | Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Indicative, 1st person, Singular | Acts 20:26 | 3 |
| μαρτυρόμενοι martyrómenoi | Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Participle, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | 1 Thessalonians 2:12 | 1 |
| μαρτυρόμενος martyrómenos | Verb, Present, Middle or Passive deponent, Participle, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Acts 26:22 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G3143, 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
- μαρτυρια martyría G3141 testimony
- μαρτυριον martýrion G3142 testimony
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
