Exploring the Meaning of Homoiopathes in Greek

ὁμοιοπαθής describes something as “like,” and it is used in two New Testament passages: one in the missionary preaching of Acts and one in James’s teaching about prayer. In both places it serves to draw a line of likeness between biblical figures and their hearers.

Root and Related Words

ὁμοιοπαθής (Homoiopathes) is connected with ὅμοιος (homoios), “like” (Strong’s G3664), and πάσχω (pascho), “to suffer” (Strong’s G3958). These related words frame the adjective as a likeness-term whose force in context is to set persons side by side as comparable.

Occurrences

“Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men of like passions with you, and bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to the living God, who made the sky, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them;” (Acts 14:15)

Here the word is part of an urgent protest: “Men, why are you doing these things?” The speakers resist being treated as more than human, placing themselves in the same human category as their audience: “We also are men of like passions with you.” Within the verse, the likeness is pressed into service for a rhetorical goal: if the messengers are like those who are reacting to them, then the crowd’s actions toward the messengers are misplaced. The statement of likeness clears space for the message that follows—“we… bring you good news”—and for the demanded change of direction: “that you should turn from these vain things to the living God.” The word thus functions as a leveling adjective, removing any imagined distance between speaker and hearer so that attention shifts away from human agents and toward “the living God, who made the sky, the earth, the sea, and all that is in them.” The immediate scene is not an abstract comparison; it is a practical claim of shared human similarity used to redirect worship and allegiance.

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it didn’t rain on the earth for three years and six months. (James 5:17)

In James, the word supports an example meant to be grasped by ordinary readers. Elijah is introduced in plain terms: “Elijah was a man,” and then comes the likeness phrase, “with a nature like ours.” This places Elijah on the same side of the human line as the audience. The verse immediately joins that likeness to a concrete action and outcome: “and he prayed earnestly that it might not rain, and it didn’t rain on the earth for three years and six months.” The word “like” is not used here to shrink Elijah’s significance, but to make the example accessible: the praying figure is not presented as belonging to a different kind of being. The likeness operates as a bridge between the readers’ world (“ours”) and the narrated effectiveness of Elijah’s prayer. In this scene, the adjective quietly underwrites the plausibility of learning from Elijah’s praying, since the one who prayed is described as comparable to those being taught.

Sense and Usage

Across its two uses, ὁμοιοπαθής does the work of comparison in the sphere of human experience. In Acts 14:15 it is deployed in direct speech as a corrective: the speakers insist on likeness with their hearers (“We also are men… with you”), and that insistence becomes part of their appeal to “turn” toward God. The comparison is relational and immediate—speaker to audience—so that the crowd is confronted with the impropriety of treating the messengers as anything other than human. Likeness here is argumentative: it supports a call to abandon “vain things” and to recognize the Creator God as the proper focus.

In James 5:17 the comparison is didactic: a known figure is described in a way that brings him into the readers’ range of identification (“like ours”). The likeness is not left as a bare descriptor; it stands next to a vivid description of prayer and its marked effect on the earth. The adjective therefore functions as a connective tissue between an exemplar and an audience, strengthening the relevance of the example by stressing similarity rather than distance.

These two scenes show that the word’s force is not mainly to supply new information about the persons named, but to shape how the audience should regard them. In Acts, likeness blocks misdirected response to the messengers; in James, likeness invites attention to Elijah’s earnest praying as something that can be meaningfully contemplated by those addressed. In both, the comparison is explicitly human-to-human, and its practical effect is to reposition the reader or hearer: away from exalting human instruments, and toward the living God (Acts), and toward earnest prayer that is portrayed as effective in history (James).

Imagery

The word’s imagery is grounded in nearness rather than distance. Acts 14:15 pictures missionaries standing before a crowd and insisting on shared humanity while pointing beyond themselves to the Maker of “the sky, the earth, the sea.” James 5:17 pictures a man praying about rain, with the likeness phrase placing him alongside the audience before the long drought is stated. In both passages, “like” draws the eye to the common human level at which the message and the example are meant to be received.

Sources: Lexical data from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance and the Translators Brief Lexicon of Extended Strongs for Greek (STEPBible, CC BY). Occurrence data from the Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament (STEPBible, CC BY). Scripture quotations from the World English Bible (public domain).