{"id":107064,"date":"2026-09-06T08:39:03","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T12:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=107064"},"modified":"2026-09-06T08:39:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T12:39:03","slug":"is-money-the-root-of-all-evil-in-the-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bible-resources\/bible-answers\/is-money-the-root-of-all-evil-in-the-bible\/","title":{"rendered":"Is “Money Is the Root of All Evil” in the Bible? Not Quite"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>10 Minute, 37 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

“Money is the root of all evil” is not in the Bible. The real verse is one word longer, and that one word changes the whole sentence. 1 Timothy 6:10 says: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Not money. The love<\/em> of money.<\/p>\n\n

Almost everyone says the short version. It sounds like scripture, it is easier to say, and most of us first heard it from someone we trusted. But in more than six hundred years of English Bibles, this verse has never once put money in the dock.<\/p>\n\n

What happened to the missing word turns out to be a genuinely good story \u2014 and it starts with a word that was not in the verse at all until the 1530s.<\/p>\n\n

Where “money is the root of all evil” actually comes from<\/h2>\n\n

The line is a shortened form of a sentence Paul wrote in a letter to a younger man named Timothy, who was leading a church in Ephesus. Ephesus lived on silver. Acts 19 records a full-scale riot there, started by silversmiths who made small silver shrines and could see their trade slipping. This was not an abstract subject in that city.<\/p>\n\n

Now line up the major English translations, oldest first, and watch the verse change clothes.<\/p>\n\n

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  • Wycliffe, 1382:<\/strong> “For the rote of alle yuelis is coueytise” \u2014 covetousness.<\/li>\n
  • Tyndale, 1534:<\/strong> “For coveteousnes is the rote of all evyll.”<\/li>\n
  • Coverdale, 1535:<\/strong> “For Couetousnes is the rote of all euell.”<\/li>\n
  • The Great Bible, 1539:<\/strong> “For coueteousnes of money is the rote of all euyll.”<\/li>\n
  • The Geneva Bible, 1560:<\/strong> “For the desire of money is the roote of all euill.”<\/li>\n
  • The Bishops’ Bible, 1568:<\/strong> “For loue of money, is the roote of all euyll.”<\/li>\n
  • The King James Bible, 1611:<\/strong> “For the loue of money is the root of all euill.”<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n

    Look at the first three. The word “money” is not in the verse at all. The subject is covetousness \u2014 plain wanting.<\/p>\n\n

    When money does turn up, in the Great Bible of 1539, it arrives in the back seat. It is the thing covetousness is pointed at. And it stays in that seat all the way through Geneva, the Bishops’ Bible and the King James \u2014 and the modern translations keep a qualifier in front of it too.<\/p>\n\n

    So the sentence people quote as a Bible verse has never actually been a Bible verse. It is what is left over when you take the real one and lift out its subject.<\/p>\n\n

    Here is our reading of why that happened, and it is not carelessness. “Covetousness” cannot be shortened. It is one word, it names a hunger, and there is nothing in it to drop. “The love of money” is three words, and two of them are removable. Once the sentence named a concrete object instead of an abstract vice, it had a spare half \u2014 and spare halves fall off.<\/p>\n\n

    You can see how firmly the older meaning held for a long time. Around 1390, Chaucer gave the Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales<\/em> one sermon text to preach over and over: Radix malorum est cupiditas<\/em>. That is the Latin Bible’s version of this same verse, and it means “greed is the root of evils.” The most famous piece of English writing ever built on 1 Timothy 6:10 is not about money at all. It is about a man who cannot stop wanting \u2014 preached, as Chaucer arranges it, by a man who cannot stop wanting.<\/p>\n\n