Faith, Believe, Fides, Credo, and Gelēfan

The way we speak affects the way we think and the way we think affects the way we speak. And the way we speak is affected by centuries of geopolitical conflict and linguistic changes. Check out this map with translations of the word, “faith,” in various languages around Europe:

(From http://ukdataexplorer.com/european-translator/)

If you look at the map, you can see certain words that are similar and clumped together. The Slavic languages have something like “vera” (in the Cyrillic alphabet, “вера”). Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are all from the North Germanic branch, so they are all similar, whereas German and Dutch are from the West Germanic branch, so they look like each other.

The Latin word for faith is, fides, so a cognate occurs in the Romance languages of Italian, French, Spanish, Portugese, Catalan, and Galacian. No big surprise there. (Romance language means it’s from Latin, the language of Rome)

English, Welsh, Basque and Maltese are not Romance languages, though, and they all have words for “faith” that are similar to Latin. This is probably because speakers of Latin and other Romance languages influenced these areas over the years. Interestingly, Romanian (a Romance language) and Irish (a Celtic language), both share a different Latin root, credo, which is a verb meaning “I believe.”

​Now, let’s look at the same map, but with translations of the word, “believe.” Once again, we can see certain groups together (I’ve circled the Slavic and Northern Germanic groups that we’ve already discussed, as well as Finnic and Eastern Baltic just for funsies):

​With the verb, “believe,” all of the Romance languages are related to the Latin verb, “credo.” Interestingly, Maltese has “jemmnu.” Maltese is Semitic language like Hebrew, so maybe it is a distant relative to the word, ‘âman (אמן)? Maltese is actually closer to Arabic, but I couldn’t find a close cognate there. Basque is a language isolate, so I don’t know if anyone really knows where the word, “uste,” came from.

Irish, Welsh, and English are really interesting. Irish maintains the same Latin verb root to get “creidim” and Welsh uses the same root to get “yn credo.” But, English uses the verb, “believe,” which is completely detached from Latin. It actually comes from an old Germanic root, which actually makes “believe” more like the German word “glauben” and the Danish word, “geloven.” The B and V sounds are similar, and they all have an l-b/v thing happening in them.

(From Google’s etymology tool)

​English is a real oddball here. A noun comes from a Latin root, while the verb comes from a Germanic root.

​Every now and then, I’ll hear an American preacher talk about Greek “faith” meaning something more than “belief.” It might seem like that from an English-speaking point of view, since “faith” and “believe” are etymologically disconnected. It might even seem that way from a Roman point of view, where “fides” and “credo” look different. But, in other languages, this difference is blurred. For example, in Russian, “faith” is “vera,” and the verb, “believe,” just adds a verb ending to get, “verit’.” The Hungarian word for faith, “hit,” takes a verb ending, “hinni,” to become “believe.”

​In the end, Russian, Hungarian, English and Latin do not really matter. The big question is:

In Greek, the word for “faith” is “pistis” (πίστις) and the word for “believe” is “pisteuō” (πιστεύω). They are the same exact words, but with different endings to denote whether it is a noun or a verb. There’s no connotation of ‘faith’ being intellectual and ‘believe’ being intellectual but with certain deeds, too. In Greek, “faith” and “believe” mean the same things that they mean in English… “faith” and “believe.” This may sound like a no-brainer, but it really is something that has thrown a lot of people off.

​Of course, etymology is a limited study, so another approach to understanding a word is by seeing how it is used in context. Here is a link to a list of a couple thousand occurrences of the Greek word for believe, “pisteuō” in Greek:

​Feel free to browse around for yourself in search of a use of “pisteuō” that means “believe and work.”