ψευδομαρτυρέω
to testify falsely
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Aorist-tense verb in the Greek New Testament →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Tense
- Aorist
- Action viewed as a simple whole, without regard to duration — often past (perfective aspect).
- Imperfect
- Continuous or repeated action in past time (“was writing”).
- Future
- Action expected in future time.
Voice
- Active
- The subject performs the action.
Mood
- Subjunctive
- Expresses probability, purpose, or possibility (the mood of contingency).
- Indicative
- States a fact or asks a factual question (the mood of reality).
Person
- 2nd person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Singular 2 times (40%)
- Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural 2 times (40%)
- Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (Robinson–Tischendorf, public domain), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where G5576 appears — 5 distinct verses across 3 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 3 verses
- Mark 10:19 ψευδομαρτυρήσῃς aor act subj 2sg You know the commandments: 'Do not murder,' 'Do not commit adultery,' 'Do not steal,' 'Do not give false testimony,' 'Do not defraud,' 'Honor your father and mother.'"
- Mark 14:56 ἐψευδομαρτύρουν impf act ind 3pl For many gave false testimony against him, and their testimony didn't agree with each other.
- Mark 14:57 ἐψευδομαρτύρουν impf act ind 3pl Some stood up, and gave false testimony against him, saying,
Luke 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.
“to testify falsely” is the headline sense of the Greek verb ψευδομαρτυρεω (pseudomartyréō). The Greek New Testament uses it only 5 verses. It clusters heavily in Mark, which alone accounts for 60% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Matthew 19:18. From the same root come ψευδομαρτυρ and ψευδομαρτυρια. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G5576 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.
- 3 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 3 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 5 verses · 100%
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 1 verse · 20%
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: Bear false witness 4×, Bare false witness 2×, Do 2×
- American Standard Version: Bear false witness 3×, Bare false witness 2×, Do 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Do not bear false witness 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Do 3×, Testify falsely 3×, Were testifying falsely 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G5576 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G5576 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders G5576 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 G5576 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in Thayer's
The 1 sense 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 utter falsehoods in giving testimony, to testify falsely, to bear false witness
Word origin
Derived from ψευδομαρτυρ (pseudomártyr) (G5575) — false witness.
From G5575 ; to be an untrue testifier that is offer falsehood in evidence : - be a false witness.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms G5576 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that tense’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ψευδομαρτυρήσῃς pseudomartyrḗsēs | Verb, Aorist, Active, Subjunctive, 2nd person, Singular | Mark 10:19 | 2 |
| ἐψευδομαρτύρουν epseudomartýroun | Verb, Imperfect, Active, Indicative, 3rd person, Plural | Mark 14:56 | 2 |
| ψευδομαρτυρήσεις pseudomartyrḗseis | Verb, Future, Active, Indicative, 2nd person, Singular | Matthew 19:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G5576, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint usage
The same Greek word ψευδομαρτυρεω appears 2 times in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), across 2 verses in 2 books.
- 2
- LXX occurrences
- Tagged occurrences of this Greek word in the Septuagint.
- 2
- verses
- Distinct Septuagint verses containing this word.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of the 39 Old Testament books.
Sample Septuagint occurrences
- Exodus 20:16 ψευδομαρτυρέω
- Deuteronomy 5:20 ψευδομαρτυρέω
Septuagint occurrences (same lexeme)
Every verse where the same Strong’s number (G5576) 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.
- Exodus 20:16 ψευδομαρτυρέω "You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
- Deuteronomy 5:20 ψευδομαρτυρέω "Neither shall you give false testimony against your neighbor.
These are occurrences of the same Greek lexeme (G5576) 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.
