A Practical Look at Greek-Portuguese NT Lexicons
The Dicionario Lexico Do Novo Testamento Grego Portugues F is a reference tool used by Portuguese-speaking students and pastors who need quick access to New Testament Greek vocabulary without jumping between multiple English resources. It covers the lexical entries for Greek words found in the New Testament, organized in dictionary format with Portuguese definitions, usage notes, and relevant citations from the Greek text. It is a lexical dictionary, not a grammar, not a commentary, and not a concordance. It maps Greek headwords to their primary meanings and semantic ranges in Portuguese. You look up a word like and you get a set of possible translations (fé, fidelidade, confiança) along with the contexts where each sense tends to appear. The "F" in the title simply refers to the section covering entries beginning with the letter F in the Greek alphabet (roughly corresponding to the Latin F section in transliteration), though some editions use it to denote a particular volume or fascicle in a multi-part series. I used a physical copy of the full set during graduate-level exegesis work. The version I had was organized by Greek alphabetical order, which means if you don't know the Greek alphabet you're not going to find anything useful. That said, even experienced readers make the mistake of looking up an inflected form instead of the lemma. The lexicon gives you the nominative singular of nouns and the first person singular present indicative of verbs as the headword. If you're searching for , you need to strip it down to first. Took me about three searches before I stopped doing that wrong on every passage.
How to Use It in Practice
Here is the workflow I ended up relying on. You encounter a Greek word in your passage. You identify its lemma. You look it up in the lexicon under the appropriate Greek heading. The entry will typically list the principal parts for verbs, the declension pattern for nouns, and then a numbered list of semantic ranges. Each sense is usually accompanied by New Testament passages where that particular meaning is attested. Your job is to match the sense numbers to the context of your passage. The trick most people miss is that these lexicons don't tell you which meaning is correct in a given verse. They list the range of possible meanings. The actual determinate sense comes from the context, the grammar of the sentence, and the broader theological argument of the book. I once spent twenty minutes flipping through entries for trying to decide whether John 1:1 required "Word," "message," "reason," or "speech." The lexicon lists all of them. None of them came with a built-in answer key. The answer had to come from the syntax and the argument structure of the prologue, not from the dictionary.
When This Resource Falls Short
Let me be straightforward about the limitations. The Portuguese NT lexicons in circulation vary significantly in quality. Some are direct translations of English resources with inadequate attention to how Portuguese theological vocabulary actually works. Terms like "justification" or "sanctification" carry different weight in Portuguese evangelical and Catholic traditions respectively, and a lexicon that doesn't account for that nuance can mislead you. I ran into this with an entry for where the Portuguese glosses seemed borrowed from a Brazilian Pentecostal commentary rather than from careful lexical analysis. The entry was not wrong per se, but it presented one theological tradition's framing as if it were the default meaning. Another real limitation: these lexicons are not updated on a regular schedule the way modern English resources like BDAG or LSJ are. If a new papyrus discovery or textual variant has shifted scholarly understanding of a word's usage, the lexicon may not reflect that. I found this out when checking a passage where the textual evidence had shifted in the critical apparatus but the dictionary entry still reflected the older reading without any note about it. Cross-referencing with a current Greek NT apparatus is necessary if you care about textual variants affecting meaning.
Getting a Copy
You can find the Dicionario Lexico Do Novo Testamento Grego Portugues F through academic theological bookstores in Brazil and Portugal, and through online retailers that carry Portuguese-language theological resources. The full set is often sold as a complete bundle rather than by individual letter fascicle. If you are working with limited budget, check whether your seminary or church library already holds a copy before purchasing. Digital versions circulate in various formats, though the quality of OCR on the scanned pages is inconsistent across sources I have seen. A properly typeset PDF from a reputable publisher is worth the wait over a hastily scanned version with misread Greek characters. If you are serious about Greek exegetical work, this lexicon works best alongside a solid Greek-English lexicon like BDAG or Louw-Nida, a comprehensive Greek grammar like Roberts or Wallace, and a good commentary series for your specific book of the New Testament. No single dictionary resolves the interpretive decisions you face in any given passage. The lexicon gives you the semantic field. The grammar tells you what the construction is doing. The commentary shows you how other readers have navigated the same difficulties. You need all three to avoid the kind of interpretive drift that comes from leaning too hard on one tool. I keep the Portuguese lexicon on my desk because it is faster to scan for Portuguese glosses than translating back and forth from English in my head. But I open BDAG on almost every entry I look up. The two together give me a wider net than either one alone. The extra time is usually about five to eight minutes per entry, which is far less than what I used to spend guessing at meanings without any reference work at all.
