Repentance
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μετάνοια is the New Testament word for repentance — but the English word has been badly handled, and the pastoral task is to restore what has been flattened. The word is built from μετά (after, with the sense of movement or change) and νοῦς (mind, perception, moral understanding).
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Full entry for μετάνοια (G3341) · Open the biblical lexicon
μετάνοια is the New Testament word for repentance — but the English word has been badly handled, and the pastoral task is to restore what has been flattened. The word is built from μετά (after, with the sense of movement or change) and νοῦς (mind, perception, moral understanding).
The BSB source-word alignment has 22 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include repentance (14), of repentance (5), {about} repentance (1), for repentance (1), to repent (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 3:8. Its strongest book concentrations include Acts (6), Luke (5), Hebrews (3), 2 Corinthians (2).
This entry includes 2 verse guides that explain exact original-language forms in context.
μετάνοια is the New Testament word for repentance — but the English word has been badly handled, and the pastoral task is to restore what has been flattened. The word is built from μετά (after, with the sense of movement or change) and νοῦς (mind, perception, moral understanding). What it names is not primarily an emotion, not primarily remorse, and certainly not the mechanical repeating of a formula. μετάνοια names a thoroughgoing change of mind that results in a changed direction of life. It is the whole-person turning of someone who once moved away from God now moving toward Him — in knowledge, orientation, allegiance, and conduct.
The New Testament treats μετάνοια as something given as well as demanded. It is summoned by preachers — John the Baptist, Jesus, the apostles — and it is summoned toward something: toward God, toward the kingdom, toward life. In Acts, repentance is paired with the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Spirit. In Romans, it is the kindness of God that draws a person toward it. In 2 Corinthians, Paul distinguishes godly grief that produces μετάνοια from worldly sorrow that only produces regret and death. Repentance, rightly understood, does not come from the terror of punishment alone; it comes from an encounter with the goodness and mercy of God that exposes the wrongness of the old life and opens the way to the new.
Pastorally, μετάνοια must be held in tension: it is urgent and it is gracious. It is the first word of the gospel summons — the kingdom is near, repent — and it is also the ongoing posture of those who live inside the covenant of grace. It is not a one-time threshold that Christians pass through and then leave behind. Nor is it a treadmill of guilt. It is the Christian's perpetual orientation: a life that keeps turning away from what is false toward what is true, from what is corrupting toward what is holy, from self-sufficiency toward reliance on God.
μετάνοια occurs about 22 times in the New Testament — a mid-frequency noun whose representative passages each do distinct theological work. It runs from John's wilderness demand for fruit, through the risen Christ's commission, through the apostolic preaching of Acts, into Paul's relocation of repentance's source in the kindness of God, and finally into Hebrews where it is named a foundational discipline. The noun names the settled state and act of turning, not merely the momentary impulse.
Produce fruit, then, in keeping with repentance.
From the opening of the New Testament, μετάνοια is not an inner feeling but a demonstrated turning with visible consequences. John the Baptist demands fruit worthy of repentance — the very thing he refused to baptize without. Repentance that changes nothing visible is, by this standard, not yet repentance.
And in His name repentance and forgiveness of sins will be proclaimed to all nations, beginning in Jerusalem.
The risen Christ defines the church's message in terms of μετάνοια. Repentance and forgiveness travel together and are proclaimed in His name to all nations. The noun is not a sub-theme of the gospel; it is part of the gospel's stated content, the turning that the announcement of forgiveness both requires and makes possible.
Testifying to Jews and Greeks alike about repentance to God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Paul summarizes his entire ministry as testifying to repentance toward God and faith in the Lord Jesus. The double movement is one response: turning to God and trusting Christ are not two separable transactions. μετάνοια here is directional — repentance to God — and it is universal, addressed to Jew and Greek alike.
Or do you disregard the riches of His kindness, tolerance, and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you to repentance?
Paul's stunning claim reframes the whole pastoral conversation: it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance. Repentance is not merely human effort or moral capitulation under threat; it is the response that God's patient goodness is designed to draw out of the heart. God's forbearance is not permission to keep sinning but an instrument aimed at the sinner's return.
Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation without regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.
Paul distinguishes godly grief from worldly sorrow with surgical precision. Godly grief produces repentance that leads to salvation without regret; worldly sorrow produces only death. This protects the congregation from two errors at once: mistaking mere grief for repentance, and mistaking repentance for emotional breakdown. The quality of the grief is judged by where it leads.
Therefore let us leave the elementary teachings about Christ and go on to maturity, not laying again the foundation of repentance from dead works, and of faith in God,
Repentance from dead works is listed among the foundational doctrines of the Christian life, set alongside faith in God. Grounding μετάνοια as a building block — not an advanced subject — shapes how the church teaches new believers and how it receives those who need to return: as people relearning a foundation, not graduating beyond it.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Greek word. Change of mind involving deliberate turning away from sin toward God, not mere feeling of regret.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
16 of 24 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
repentance, a change of mind
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Read verseFull New Testament corpus: 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, 140,628 tokens. Data source: honza/textus-receptus (data only), with authority check against byztxt/greektext-textus-receptus.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
This word appears as a noun across 2 case and number patterns. The form changes show how the word functions in a sentence; they do not change the basic lexical meaning by themselves.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 8 selected witnesses from 22 lexical occurrence verses.
μετάνοια is built from this root:
God’s kindness aims at repentance, highlighting the proper response to grace. 2 Timothy 2:20-26
Defines the required response to the kingdom’s arrival. Acts 11:1-18
Defines the necessary preparation for receiving the Messiah. Acts 20:17-24
Defines the required response to the gospel. Acts 5:27-42
Represents the necessary heart-turn preceding salvation. Luke 24:36–49
Defines the purpose of Christ’s call. Luke 3:1–6
Identified as God’s granted pathway to life for both Jew and Gentile.
Defines the turning required in response to the gospel.
Repentance is granted by Christ and essential for receiving forgiveness.
The ultimate goal of correction is restoration through repentance and renewed knowledge of the truth.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
This noun gives a preacher language for one of the most necessary and most misunderstood movements in the Christian life. It lets you distinguish genuine repentance from mere remorse, emotional breakdown, self-punishment, or a moral self-improvement program. It corrects the shallow notion that repentance is feeling bad about sin, the legalistic distortion that treats repentance as a performance that must reach sufficient sincerity before God will forgive, and the easy-believism that treats conversion as a cognitive transaction with no moral reorientation attached.
Above all it corrects the pastoral failure of presenting repentance as the entrance exam to grace rather than as the response that grace itself produces. The way to frame it from the pulpit is to begin with the distortions your people are most likely carrying — the sense that they must be sorry enough before God will listen — and then show them the actual New Testament shape: John demanding visible fruit, Paul saying God's kindness is what leads to repentance, 2 Corinthians 7 distinguishing the grief that saves from the grief that only kills.
Then land it: God is not waiting for your sorrow to reach a qualifying level. He is actively using His own goodness to draw you home, and repentance is the turning that goodness produces.
Luke.24.47
μετάνοια is the noun built from μετά (here in the sense of change or movement) and νοῦς (mind, perception, moral understanding); Abbott-Smith glosses it as after-thought, change of mind, repentance. The morphological core points to a changed mind, but the New Testament usage fills the noun with the whole movement of a turned life, not a private mental adjustment.
It must be distinguished from its own verb, μετανοέω, only in part of speech, not in meaning; and from μεταμέλεια / μεταμέλομαι, which name regret. In the Septuagint the noun is rare (Proverbs 14:15; Wisdom; Sirach), so the New Testament's heavy theological use is largely its own development, drawing its substance from the prophetic call to turn rather than from a fixed Greek philosophical term.
Though the noun μετάνοια is uncommon in the Septuagint, its substance arrives from the prophetic tradition of turning. When John the Baptist demands fruit worthy of repentance, he stands at the end of a long line of prophets who called Israel to שׁוּב — to return from idolatry, injustice, and apathy to the God of the covenant. The New Testament takes that prophetic weight and presses it into a new moment: the kingdom is at hand, the long-awaited one has come, and the required response is a thoroughgoing reorientation of the whole person toward God.
In Luke 15 the prodigal's coming to himself and turning home is the narrative shape of the noun; in Acts it becomes the first word of apostolic preaching; in Paul its source is located in God's own kindness. The trajectory runs from prophetic summons to apostolic proclamation to the interior architecture of the maturing believer's life.
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