I heard it in the church lobby, said cheerfully, about somebody who wasn’t there. “Money is the root of all evil.” Those words are not in the Bible. The verse people reach for is 1 Timothy 6:10, and what it warns about is the love of money. A different thing, aimed at a different person.
What 1 Timothy 6:10 actually says
For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
1 Timothy 6:10 (KJV)
Three words come off on the way to the proverb, and they are the three that decide what the sentence is about. Paul writes about loving money. The Greek behind it is philargyria, one word built out of love and silver. Every English Bible I have checked keeps the appetite in. They differ only about which word for it: the Geneva Bible of 1599 and the Douay-Rheims say the desire of money, and most of the rest say the love of money.
Now the whole verse, in a translation four hundred years younger:
For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some have been led astray from the faith in their greed, and have pierced themselves through with many sorrows.
1 Timothy 6:10 (WEB)
Bibles have never agreed on how absolute that root clause should be. “A root” here, where the King James has “the root.” “All kinds of evil,” where the King James has “all evil.” Young’s Literal Translation reads “a root of all the evils.” The New English Translation keeps “the root,” but reads “all evils.” Of the English Bibles I have checked, only the King James and the Geneva print “the root of all evil” with nothing softening either end.
Why the short version stuck
That is the reading the proverb kept, without the three words that limit it. The short version is better English, and it fits inside a sentence: seven words where the King James has ten.
What is left makes a claim the letter never makes, that the danger lives inside a substance. Paul’s letter to Timothy does not put it there. Money pays for meals, and it funds a relief collection that Paul organizes across three provinces for the poor believers in Jerusalem, in 1 Corinthians 16 and Romans 15. In Luke 8 a group of women support Jesus and the twelve out of their own possessions, which means somebody’s money bought the food.
Who the misquote lets off the hook
Years ago a man sat down across from me in the counseling room at my church and said the line almost word for word. He had driven there in a car with a noise in it. He meant the people who had money, and then he spent most of an hour telling me what other people earned and what he would do if a number like that ever landed in his account.
He never once mentioned what he had. And the sentence he had been handed all his life, the one about money being the root of all evil, had given him a clean exemption, because he was not the one with the money.
I had been listening to him for twenty minutes before I noticed I had run the same arithmetic that spring, on a house I drove past on the way to work. I had no intention of buying it and I had priced it anyway.
Paul closes that door one verse earlier, and he closes it on wanting. The World English Bible has “those who are determined to be rich.” The King James has “they that will be rich.” Most modern Bibles say want, or desire, or long. The Greek verb underneath, boulomai, runs the whole range, from a settled purpose down to a wish, and wherever a translator lands on it the warning falls on the appetite and not on the amount. You can want it just as hard from inside a car with a noise in it.
Paul’s instructions to the rich, seven verses later
If money itself were the root of all evil, the end of the chapter would make no sense. Paul turns to the people who have it and tells them what to do:
Charge those who are rich in this present age that they not be arrogant, nor have their hope set on the uncertainty of riches, but on the living God, who richly provides us with everything to enjoy; that they do good, that they be rich in good works, that they be ready to distribute, willing to share; laying up in store for themselves a good foundation against the time to come, that they may lay hold of eternal life.
1 Timothy 6:17-19 (WEB)
Paul tells them to move their confidence off the balance sheet and onto God, and to be easy to ask. Nobody can be told to give away what he does not have.
Godliness with contentment
Go back to verse six and the paragraph turns out to be about profit.
But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world, and we certainly can’t carry anything out. But having food and clothing, we will be content with that.
1 Timothy 6:6-8 (WEB)
Gain is a business word, and Paul did not choose it. He has just described men who suppose that godliness is a means of gain, and the word for gain is the same both times. Paul takes it back from them. We arrive owning nothing and we leave the same way, so the only profit that survives the trip was never property. The gain he names is godliness with contentment, the two of them together, and then he prices it: food, clothing, and the ability to stop there.
Paul had to learn the contentment part, and says so in Philippians 4:11. The line everybody knows from that passage, I can do all things through Christ, closes a paragraph about being hungry. And Jesus gave the test for it, in Matthew 6:21: “for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
Hebrews 13:5 puts the whole instruction in one word. Behind the World English Bible’s “Be free from the love of money” stands a single Greek adjective, aphilargyros: the word from 1 Timothy with a negative letter on the front. The warning and the cure come off one root. The second half of the verse says what the cure looks like: “content with such things as you have.”
He and I were both counting in that room. He had a sentence ready that kept the danger inside somebody else’s wallet, and by then I had lost the use of it.