ἀπόστολος
apostle
Full lexicon entry — Thayer's Greek Lexicon
From Thayer's Greek Lexicon
Where this word appears
See every Genitive-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
- Genitive
- The case of source, possession, or “of” — answers “whose / from what.”
- Nominative
- The case of the subject (and the predicate nominative).
- Accusative
- The case of the direct object and of extent.
- Dative
- The case of the indirect object, means, or location — “to / for / with / in.”
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one.
- Singular
- One.
3 verses where G652 appears in the Dative case in the Book of Acts. 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.
Acts
- Acts 1:2 ἀποστόλοις n dat pl masc until the day in which he was received up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen.
- Acts 14:4 ἀποστόλοις n dat pl masc But the multitude of the city was divided. Part sided with the Jews, and part with the apostles.
- Acts 15:22 ἀποστόλοις n dat pl masc Then it seemed good to the apostles and the elders, with the whole assembly, to choose men out of their company, and send them to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas: Judas called Barsabbas, and Silas, chief men among the brothers.
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.
The Greek noun αποστολος centers on the idea of “apostle.” First canonically at Matthew 10:2, it enters the text early. The Greek New Testament uses it across 78 verses — moderately common. Acts dominates its distribution — 28 of 78 verses. Related forms include αποστελλω and αποστολη. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's G652 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 →
- 78
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 78 distinct verses.
- 21 / 27
- NT books
- The word appears in 21 of 27 New Testament books.
- #214
- by frequency
- Top 250 most frequent Greek words (rank 214 of 5,347 Greek words by occurrence).
View all 78 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Acts 28 verses 36%
- 1 Corinthians 9 verses 12%
- Luke 6 verses 8%
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 78 distinct verses.
- Lukan (Luke–Acts) 34 verses · 44%
- Pauline corpus 33 verses · 42%
- Gospels 9 verses · 12%
- Johannine 4 verses · 5%
- General (Catholic) Epistles 4 verses · 5%
- Revelation 3 verses · 4%
- Hebrews 1 verse · 1%
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: Apostles 52×, Apostle 17×, Apostles' 5×
- American Standard Version: Apostles 52×, Apostle 17×, Be an apostle 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Apostles 50×, Apostle 19×, Apostles’ 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Apostles 57×, Apostle 18×, The 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders G652 across 81 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders G652 across 81 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 G652 across 78 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders G652 across 91 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 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.
- a delegate, messenger, one sent forth with orders
Word origin
Derived from αποστελλω (apostéllō) (G649) — to send away.
From G649 ; a delegate ; specifically an ambassador of the Gospel; officially a commissioner of christ (apostle) (with miraculous powers): - apostle messenger he that is sent.
— Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (1890), public domain.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms G652 takes in the Greek New Testament, most frequent first — each parse links to that case’s occurrences in the concordance.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| ἀποστόλων apostólōn | Noun, Genitive, Plural, Masculine | Matthew 10:2 | 22 |
| ἀπόστολος apóstolos | Noun, Nominative, Singular, Masculine | John 13:16 | 18 |
| ἀπόστολοι apóstoloi | Noun, Nominative, Plural, Masculine | Mark 6:30 | 16 |
| ἀποστόλους apostólous | Noun, Accusative, Plural, Masculine | Luke 6:13 | 14 |
| ἀποστόλοις apostólois | Noun, Dative, Plural, Masculine | Acts 1:2 | 6 |
| ἀπόστολον apóstolon | Noun, Accusative, Singular, Masculine | Philippians 2:25 | 2 |
| ἀποστόλου apostólou | Noun, Genitive, Singular, Masculine | 2 Corinthians 12:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other Thayer's entries built from the same root as G652, 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.
