Dolos: The Crafty Con

Word of the Week

August 2, 2025

Dolos: The Crafty Con

 

For “the one who desires life, to love and see good days, must keep his tongue from evil and lips from speaking deceit.

1 Peter 3:10 NASB2020

 

A text arrives announcing that your bank needs to verify your contact information.  “Just click this link to confirm your address.”

Or an email declares, “Your package is ready.  Click this link to track it.”

Perhaps you get a phone call from a panicky teenager claiming to be your grandson.  “Gramps, I’ve been arrested in Mexico, and I need money for bail!”

The electronic world is filled with scams.  I recently heard of a banker who declared, “The world is full of thieves!”

And he’s right.  The Federal Trade Commission and the FBI reported losses to scams in 2023 as $12.5 billion.  Initial estimates for 2024 bumped the total up to 16 billion dollars.  And those are just the victims that reported their losses to the government.  The real total could be ten times higher!

The methods used by con artists keep changing, but the underlying problem goes back to antiquity.  Cunning practitioners of deceit show up more than once in the Bible, and we can take the first steps in understanding this vice by examining a Greek word that describes it.

The New Testament uses the word dolos [DAH-lahss] to describe the sort of deception that aims to accomplish its aims by misleading its targets.  Dolos occurs 11 times in the New Testament, and is usually translated as “deceit, deception, craftiness, guile, cunning.”

What does dolos look like?

• Paul encountered a Jewish trickster named Elymas who had wormed his way into a place of influence with the Roman governor of Cyprus. He claimed to be a wise man like the Magi who came to visit the baby Jesus, but he was really just an opportunist who played on the governor’s interest in spiritual matters.  Paul denounced him as “You who are full of all deceit and fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness!” (Acts 13:10).
• When the Jewish leaders looked for a way to dispose of that troublesome Jesus of Nazareth, they wanted to arrest him and condemn him to death. However, a frontal attack would spark riots, so “they plotted together to arrest Jesus covertly [literally, by deceit] and kill Him” (Matthew 26:4; Mark 14:1).

We should not be surprised at the widespread impact of deception.  Jesus listed dolos as one of the many sins that flow from the corrupt hearts of mankind (Mark 7:22).  Later on, the apostle Paul included it in the catalog of vices that climaxed man’s rebellion against the Lord (Romans 1:29).

We are all tempted to deceive people in order to get what we want, or to escape something that we want to avoid. However, Scripture makes it clear that deception plays no part in the life of a follower of a holy God.

• Jesus never used it.

“He who committed no sin, nor was any deceit found in His mouth (1 Peter 2:22)

• Jesus praised Nathanael as a man who refused to use it.

“Jesus saw Nathanael coming to Him, and said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite, in whom there is no deceit!’ (John 1:47).

• Paul didn’t use it in ministry.

“For our exhortation does not come from error or impurity or by way of deceit” (1 Thessalonians 2:3).  See also 2 Corinthians 12:16.

And we should never descend to it either!  Peter calls on us to put aside “all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander (1 Peter 2:1).  And he quotes the Psalms to promise that the pathway to success and happiness to keep our lips from speaking deceit (1 Peter 3:10).

Manipulating the truth or misleading a target may seem like the easiest way to accomplish your objective, but Scripture categorically condemns it.  A follower of Jesus must remove this tool from their toolbox.

 

Study Hint:

In Acts 13, Paul paired dolos with a second word for deceit: rhadiourgia [hrah-dee-er-GEE-ah), translated “fraud” in the NASB.  This word comes from a root that means “ease in doing.”  Instead of taking the direct, difficult route of achieving your goals by work or by honest persuasion, this person takes the easy way out.  Just trick the target into doing what you want!

 

Coming Up

We eagerly anticipate a visit from a close friend.  But we might not be as excited to find out that Uncle Henry is coming to stay for a week.  Even in Scripture, there is more than one kind of visit.  Next week we will look at the Greek word for “visit” – including all the different varieties.

Ezra Project 2025