Are the 7 Deadly Sins in the Bible? Each Sin Is, the List Is Not

No Bible verse lists the seven deadly sins together, though Scripture warns against every one of them: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. Christian teachers drew up the list later. In the fourth century a monk named Evagrius counted eight, and Pope Gregory the Great reshaped them into seven with pride set above them. The list we know today counts pride among the seven.

So the list is not Scripture, but it grew out of something Jesus said. “For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders,” he told his disciples, and he went on through covetousness and “an evil eye” to pride: “All these evil things come from within, and defile the man” (Mark 7:21–23). The monks who made the list were looking where Jesus told them to look, into the heart, and they were naming what grows there before it ever reaches the hands.

Where does the Bible talk about the seven deadly sins?

Scripture has a warning for each of the seven, and here is one verse for each, in the King James Version:

The New Testament also has longer lists of sins, and several of the seven turn up in them together. Paul’s “works of the flesh” include “hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife” and “envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings” (Galatians 5:20–21), and in the next breath he names what the Spirit grows in their place: “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (Galatians 5:22–23).

Is Proverbs 6:16–19 the list of seven deadly sins?

It is the nearest the Bible comes to a numbered list of seven: “These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: a proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren” (Proverbs 6:16–19).

But read it slowly and you find a different seven, for only pride, in “a proud look”, is on both lists. The others in Proverbs are lying, violence, “an heart that deviseth wicked imaginations”, feet quick to do harm, false witness and spreading quarrels, which are sins of the tongue, the hands, the heart and the feet. The traditional seven mostly lie further in, among the desires behind such acts.

Where did the list of seven deadly sins come from?

The list began with monks who spent their lives watching their own thoughts. Evagrius Ponticus, who died in 399, counted eight tempting thoughts that hold all the others within them: gluttony, sexual immorality, love of money, sadness, anger, acedia (a listless weariness of soul), vainglory and pride. He also left a line that any of us can use when we are tempted: “Whether these thoughts are able to disturb the soul or not is not up to us; but whether they linger or not, and whether they arouse passions or not; that is up to us.”

John Cassian, who travelled among the monks of the desert of Scete, recorded the same eight, and the later books of his Institutes were often treated as a treatise of their own, “On the Eight Principal Faults.” Then Gregory the Great, pope from 590 until his death in 604, reshaped the list in his long commentary on the Book of Job. He set pride apart, above all the rest, and pictured it as a queen at war: “For when pride, the queen of sins, has fully possessed a conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins, as if to some of her generals, to lay it waste.” Gregory’s seven generals are “vain glory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust.” Envy is new to the list, and acedia no longer stands on its own, since Gregory counts “slothfulness in fulfilling the commands” among the offspring of melancholy.

Gregory also explained why the seven come in the order he gave them, for each springs from the one before. Vainglory begets envy, because it cannot bear another having the name it wants; envy begets anger; anger sinks into melancholy; melancholy, finding no joy within, reaches for possessions; and last come the two bodily sins, gluttony and lust. “Of these seven,” he wrote, “five namely are spiritual, and two are carnal.”

In the same picture Gregory saw our hope. Because we were held captive by these seven, he wrote, “our Redeemer came to the spiritual battle of our liberation, full of the spirit of sevenfold grace.” His “sevenfold grace” recalls Isaiah’s promise of the Messiah, which in the Douay-Rheims Bible names seven gifts: “the spirit of wisdom, and of understanding, the spirit of counsel, and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge, and of godliness. And he shall be filled with the spirit of the fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:2–3, Douay-Rheims). So in Gregory’s picture seven sins lay the heart waste, and Christ comes with sevenfold grace to win it back.

Thomas Aquinas, who died in 1274, still followed Gregory, listing vainglory, envy, anger, sloth, covetousness, gluttony and lust, with pride above them as “queen of them all.” Later lists dropped vainglory and put pride itself among the seven. That is the form the Catechism of the Catholic Church gives today, and it says the capital sins are known “following St. John Cassian and St. Gregory the Great”: “They are pride, avarice, envy, wrath, lust, gluttony, and sloth or acedia.”

Why are they called “deadly” sins?

The older name is “capital” sins, from the Latin caput, a head, because each one is the head of a whole family of others. The Catechism says they are called capital “because they engender other sins, other vices.” Gregory listed the families. From envy, he wrote, “there spring hatred, whispering, detraction, exultation at the misfortunes of a neighbour, and affliction at his prosperity.” A small resentment left alone becomes a habit of mind, and the habit becomes the way we treat people.

“Deadly” points to what sin does when it is left to grow. James traces the path in one sentence: “Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death” (James 1:15). John speaks of “a sin unto death” and adds, “there is a sin not unto death” (1 John 5:16–17).

The churches read those verses in different ways. The Catholic Church distinguishes mortal sin, which “destroys charity in the heart of man by a grave violation of God’s law,” from venial sin, and teaches that a sin is mortal only when it involves grave matter “committed with full knowledge and deliberate consent.” By that teaching, a passing flash of envy need not be a mortal sin, though envy fed and chosen in a grave matter can be. The Orthodox Church in America says Orthodoxy has no such categories, and that the sins on the list, though deadly, “are not ‘worse’ in the ultimate sense than sins that are not on the list.” The Reformed Westminster Larger Catechism holds that some sins are “more heinous in the sight of God than others,” yet every sin, “even the least,” deserves God’s wrath and “cannot be expiated but by the blood of Christ.” For all of them Paul’s words stand: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). There is more on the one sin Jesus calls unforgivable in what the unforgivable sin is, and it is not one of these seven.

Which is the worst of the seven deadly sins?

The teachers who shaped the list all say it is pride. Gregory called it the root from which the other seven spring, quoting the Book of Sirach, “pride is the beginning of all sin” (Sirach 10:15, Douay-Rheims), a book in Catholic Bibles that most Protestant Bibles leave out. Aquinas called it the queen of the others. Proverbs puts it plainly: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18). The best-known verses are gathered in 20 Bible verses about pride.

Pride sits at the top because it turns us away from God before it turns us against anyone else. Scripture answers it with the humility of Christ. “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus,” Paul writes, who “made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant” and “humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Philippians 2:5–8).

Are there 10 or 12 deadly sins?

No, the traditional lists have eight, as Evagrius and Cassian taught, or seven, as Gregory and the Catechism teach, and none of them has ten or twelve. The best-known list of ten in the Bible is something else altogether, the Ten Commandments, which say what God commands rather than which desires lead us astray.

Can the seven deadly sins be forgiven?

Yes, every one of them can be forgiven. To call a sin deadly is to say where it leads, and it sets no limit on God’s mercy. Paul wrote to the church in Corinth with a list of sinners that includes the covetous and drunkards, and then added, “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). John’s promise holds for each of the seven: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

The list began as a way of looking into the heart, and the heart is where God does his work in us. If we look honestly, brothers and sisters, we will find all seven in ourselves, and we are not left alone with what we find. We can pray the psalmist’s prayer as our own: “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalm 51:10).

Related reading

• The Seven Princes of Hell Are Not in the Bible
• 19 Bible verses about jealousy and envy
• 24 Bible verses about money and greed
• 15 Bible verses about gluttony
• 24 Bible verses about sloth
• Examination of Conscience: A Catholic Guide by the Ten Commandments