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Lexicon / Greek

ἀγάπη

agapē

love; charity

G26noun, feminine

Semantic range

  1. 1love as deliberate, chosen goodwill
  2. 2the love God has and gives, rather than a love generated by the lover
  3. 3in the plural: the love feasts of the early Church

The popular claim that agapē means "divine love" while philē means "friendship love" is overstated — the Septuagint uses agapē for Amnon's lust for Tamar (2 Samuel 13:15) — but the New Testament does load the word deliberately. What distinguishes it is not intensity but direction: agapē is love as a settled disposition toward another's good, independent of their attractiveness or return.

That is why 1 Corinthians 13 describes it entirely in verbs and negations — suffers long, is kind, envies not, vaunts not itself — rather than as a feeling. Mormon's version of that chapter adds the decisive line: "charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever" (Moroni 7:47), and then the instruction that follows makes it a gift to be prayed for, not a virtue to be manufactured: "pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love" (Moroni 7:48).

The KJV's "charity" comes through Latin caritas. In 1611 it meant costly self-giving love; four centuries of drift toward almsgiving and condescension have made it a poor translation now, which is why modern readers should hear "love" wherever the KJV prints charity.

In the King James Version

love

charity

dear

feast of charity

Where it appears

See also