ἀγάπη agapē — love, esteem, regard, affection

The word

ἀγάπη (agapē) is the standard New Testament noun for love. It occurs roughly 116 times across the New Testament and is paired with the verb form ἀγαπάω (agapaō), which appears about 143 times. The noun is less common than the verb in pre-Christian Greek, and in Jewish-Greek (the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible) and Christian usage it acquires a particular density of meaning — partly because it became one of the standard Septuagint renderings of the Hebrew אַהֲבָה (ahavah, “love”).

Range of meaning

BDAG s.v. ἀγάπη glosses the noun as “the quality of warm regard for and interest in another, esteem, affection, regard, love.” It does not single-handedly mean “selfless” or “unconditional” love in the lexical sense — those associations are interpretive overlays that have accumulated around the word in popular Christian usage, particularly through the influence of the four-loves taxonomy (see below). The lexicon’s gloss covers a broad range of warm regard.

In actual New Testament usage, the word occurs in a wide range of contexts: God’s love for the world (John 3:16, where the verb is used), love between believers (1 John 4:7–21), love within marriage (Ephesians 5:25), and the love that is the subject of 1 Corinthians 13.

”Charity” in the KJV

The KJV renders ἀγάπη as “charity” throughout 1 Corinthians 13 — fifteen occurrences in the chapter alone. This is not an idiosyncratic choice: it follows the Latin Vulgate’s caritas (the Latin word from which the English “charity” derives via Old French). In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English, “charity” carried a much wider sense than it does today — closer to “Christian love” or “loving regard” generally, rather than specifically “almsgiving” or “gifts to the poor.”

The narrowing of “charity” in modern English to mean specifically “donations” or “the work of charitable organisations” is what makes the KJV’s rendering feel strange to modern ears. The translators were not using the word in its later restricted sense.

The four-loves taxonomy

A widely repeated framework — popularised in the twentieth century by C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (1960) and earlier by Bishop Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros (Swedish 1930–36) — distinguishes four Greek words for love:

Two notes on this taxonomy:

• Storgē and erōs do not appear in the New Testament. They are part of the wider Greek vocabulary of love but not used by NT authors.
• The line between agapē and phileō is not as rigid in NT usage as the popular framework suggests. Some NT passages use the two words near-interchangeably (notably John 21:15–17, where the famous shift between the verbs has been read both as theologically significant and as stylistic variation; see our entry on agapaō and phileō in John 21).

The taxonomy is useful as a teaching device but should not be treated as a hard lexical rule. BDAG and other standard Greek lexicons document the overlap.

Why the translation choice matters

When a reader encounters 1 Corinthians 13 in a modern translation, the word “love” carries the full range of modern English associations — romantic, familial, friendly, abstract. When the same reader encounters it in the KJV, “charity” foregrounds the older English sense of generous regard for others. Neither rendering is wrong; they reflect different translation choices in different historical contexts. Reading both side by side often makes the passage strange in productive ways.

Read on Bible1.org

Read the full chapter on our companion site: 1 Corinthians 13 on Bible1.org → — BSB text in context, all verses.