Place
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Topos is the ordinary Greek word for a place, location, or region, but in the New Testament it operates across a surprising theological range. Ordinary uses abound: a place to stay, a place in the boat, the place of the skull.
Reader summary
Full entry for τόπος (G5117) · Open the biblical lexicon
Topos is the ordinary Greek word for a place, location, or region, but in the New Testament it operates across a surprising theological range. Ordinary uses abound: a place to stay, a place in the boat, the place of the skull.
The BSB source-word alignment has 94 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include place (52), a place (7), . . . (5), places (5), everywhere (3).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Matthew 12:43. Its strongest book concentrations include Luke (19), Acts (18), John (16), Mark (10).
Topos is the ordinary Greek word for a place, location, or region, but in the New Testament it operates across a surprising theological range. Ordinary uses abound: a place to stay, a place in the boat, the place of the skull. But Jesus in John's Gospel uses topos with concentrated theological weight: 'I go to prepare a place (topos) for you' (John 14:2-3). The word appears in contexts of presence — where God is encountered, where prayer is offered, where the Spirit moves.
Luke's Gospel notes that Jesus 'withdrew to deserted places and prayed' — topos as the chosen location of communion with the Father. Acts uses topos for the place where the disciples were gathered and were shaken by the Spirit's arrival. Paul uses it for the opportunity or opening that comes in ministry, and for the location of prayer ('I desire that men pray in every topos,' 1 Tim.
2. 8). The word's theological range — from simple geography to the prepared dwelling of God's own presence — reflects the incarnation's logic: the God who has a name also inhabits places, chooses places, prepares places, and promises to bring his people to the place where he is.
The local NT index currently counts about 94 occurrences of topos in the New Testament across all four Gospels, Acts, and the Epistles. Its distribution is wide, with the majority of uses as ordinary geographical markers (place, location, region) and a smaller but theologically significant cluster in John 14, John's passion narrative (Golgotha), and Acts' account of the Spirit's arrival. The word's range from mundane location to eschatological dwelling place mirrors the incarnation's movement.
In My Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you?
Jesus' topos-promise to his disciples is among the most comforting uses of the word in Scripture. The word is concrete and spatial: he is going to prepare an actual place. Whatever the heavenly dwelling looks like, it is a place — somewhere the disciples will be with him. The promise is relational and spatial simultaneously.
Carrying His own cross, He went out to The Place of the Skull, which in Hebrew is called Golgotha.
The place of the crucifixion is named: topos — the skull place, Golgotha. The specificity of the topos matters. The cross is not an abstract spiritual event but something that happened in a real place, outside the city gate, on a hill with a name. The incarnate Son died at a specific location in a specific city in a specific region.
At daybreak, Jesus went out to a solitary place, and the crowds were looking for Him. They came to Him and tried to keep Him from leaving.
After they had prayed, their meeting place was shaken, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.
The prayer meeting in Acts 4 is punctuated by the shaking of the topos. The Spirit's arrival is associated with a physical location being moved. The place of gathered prayer becomes the place of the Spirit's manifest presence. This echoes the Old Testament's pattern of holy places and the Spirit's movement at Sinai.
And do not give the devil a foothold.
Paul's use of topos here is figurative: do not give the devil a place, a foothold, an opening. The word carries the spatial metaphor into the moral domain — sinful patterns give the adversary a territory, a location of operation, within the life. Not giving topos is the opposite of the John 14 promise: Jesus prepares a place for us; do not prepare a place for the enemy.
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.
Greek word. A specific portion of space viewed as occupied or appropriated to something definite.
Textus Receptus witness, full corpus Greek token appearances from Scrivener 1894 Textus Receptus in the full New Testament corpus.
16 of 92 Greek text appearances shown. Linked morphology labels have verse guides.
a place
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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 7 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.
Verse guides are not available for this word yet, so verse references remain plain evidence markers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 4 selected witnesses from 94 lexical occurrence verses.
τόπος is a primary word - no further derivation.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Topos is a word that reminds preachers and teachers that the faith is not placeless. God does not work in abstractions disconnected from physical location. He gave Israel a land. He chose Jerusalem as the place where his name would dwell. He sent his Son to be born in Bethlehem, to minister in Galilee, to die outside Jerusalem, to rise from a specific garden tomb.
Jesus promises his disciples a topos — a real, prepared, specific place where they will be with him. This embodied, located character of the gospel is not an accommodation to human limitation. It is a reflection of God's own way of relating to creation: he inhabits places, chooses places, and prepares places. The church that meets in a particular location on a particular day is not doing something incidental.
It is participating in the pattern: gathered at a topos to call on the name of the Lord. The Acts 4 account of the prayer meeting where the place shook is a reminder that the God who prepared a place for his people also shows up at the places where they gather. At the same time, John 4:21-24 (neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem — God is spirit, and true worshippers worship in spirit and truth) prevents topos from becoming idolatrous geography.
No single physical location is uniquely holy in the new covenant. God is present wherever his people gather in his name. But they do gather — and the gathering has a topos.
John.14.2
Topos is the origin of English 'topography' and 'topic' (originally a place of argument in rhetoric). The word covers physical place, region, location, opportunity (a metaphorical 'place' in which something can happen, as in Eph. 4. 27 and Rom. 15. 23), and position or rank. The LXX uses topos extensively to translate Hebrew māqôm (place), including the theologically loaded 'the place where the Lord your God will choose for his name to dwell' formula in Deuteronomy.
This background gives topos a potential sanctity it carries in contexts where prayer, worship, and the Spirit's presence are in view.
The Hebrew māqôm (place) theology is pervasive in Deuteronomy: 'the place the Lord your God will choose' for worship and sacrifice appears repeatedly as the organizing principle of Israel's worship. This single place theology (centralization in Jerusalem) gives way in John 4 to Jesus' declaration that the worship of the Father will occur neither in Samaria nor in Jerusalem exclusively but in Spirit and truth.
The eschatological completion in Revelation 21:3 — 'the dwelling (skēnē) of God is with humanity, and he will live with them' — is the final answer to the topos question. God's own presence is the place. The many rooms Jesus prepares in the Father's house (John 14. 2) are the personal expression of that eschatological arrival: each one prepared, none accidental, the whole company in the presence of the one who is the place of God's dwelling.
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