τελώνης
tax collector
‘tax collector’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Nominative-case word in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Case
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
13 distinct verses where G5057 appears in the Nominative case, across 3 books. Filtered view — show all forms. 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 6 verses
- Matthew 5:46 τελῶναι n nom pl masc For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Don't even the tax collectors do the same?
- Matthew 9:10 τελῶναι n nom pl masc It happened as he sat in the house, behold, many tax collectors and sinners came and sat down with Jesus and his disciples.
- Matthew 10:3 τελώνης n nom sg masc Philip; Bartholomew; Thomas; Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus; and Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus;
- Matthew 18:17 τελώνης n nom sg masc If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the assembly. If he refuses to hear the assembly also, let him be to you as a Gentile or a tax collector.
- Matthew 21:31 τελῶναι n nom pl masc Which of the two did the will of his father?" They said to him, "The first." Jesus said to them, "Most assuredly I tell you that the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering into the Kingdom of God before you.
- Matthew 21:32 τελῶναι n nom pl masc For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you didn't believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. When you saw it, you didn't even repent afterward, that you might believe him.
Mark 1 verse
Luke 6 verses
- Luke 3:12 τελῶναι n nom pl masc Tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, "Teacher, what must we do?"
- Luke 7:29 τελῶναι n nom pl masc When all the people and the tax collectors heard this, they declared God to be just, having been baptized with John's baptism.
- Luke 15:1 τελῶναι n nom pl masc Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming close to him to hear him.
- Luke 18:10 τελώνης n nom sg masc "Two men went up into the temple to pray; one was a Pharisee, and the other was a tax collector.
- Luke 18:11 τελώνης n nom sg masc The Pharisee stood and prayed to himself like this: 'God, I thank you, that I am not like the rest of men, extortioners, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
- Luke 18:13 τελώνης n nom sg masc But the tax collector, standing far away, wouldn't even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'
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.
“tax collector” is the headline sense of the Greek noun τελωνης (telṓnēs). More than half of its appearances fall in Luke. It appears 20 verses across 3 books of the Greek New Testament, among its uncommon vocabulary. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. Older and newer Bibles part ways — “publicans” in the King James Version, “tax collectors” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. See the sense tree, 20-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5057 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 →
- 20
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 20 distinct verses.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 of 27 New Testament books.
- #607
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Greek words (rank 607 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 20 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 20 distinct verses.
- Gospels 20 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 10 verses · 50%
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: Publicans 16×, Publican 6×
- American Standard Version: Publicans 14×, Publican 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Tax collectors 14×, Tax collector 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Tax collectors 15×, Tax collector 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5057 across 22 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5057 across 22 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G5057 across 20 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G5057 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- a renter or farmer of taxes
- a tax gatherer…
Word origin
Derived from τελος (télos) (G5056) — end.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms G5057 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| τελῶναι telō̂nai | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 5:46 | 8 |
| τελωνῶν telōnō̂n | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 9:11 | 7 |
| τελώνης telṓnēs | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | Matthew 10:3 | 5 |
| τελώνην telṓnēn | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Luke 5:27 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G5057, 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
- τελειος téleios G5046 perfect
- τελεσφορεω telesphoréō G5052 to mature
- τελεω teléō G5055 to finish
- τηλαυγως tēlaugōs G5081 from afar clearly
- τολμαω tolmáō G5111 to dare
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
