Published 2026-11-01 · 4 min read
How many times is purgatory mentioned in the Bible?
The word “purgatory” appears 0 times in the King James Bible, and standard Bible translations do not use it either. The Catholic teaching on purgatory rests on a few passages, mainly 2 Maccabees 12:46, which is not in Protestant Bibles, and on Church tradition; Protestants read those passages differently.
The method file (JSON) lists the rule, the source hash and the zero result.
How we counted
Rule: whole word, any case, in the verse text of our King James Version file. A letter, digit, underscore or hyphen next to the match disqualifies it, so a form never matches inside a longer word; possessives such as “’s” stay in. An occurrence is one match; a verse counts once however many matches it holds. This is the same rule as our Bible word counter.
| Form | Occurrences | Verses | In the headline |
|---|---|---|---|
| purgatory | 0 | 0 | yes |
| Headline total | 0 | 0 |
Why the count is zero
We searched all 31,102 verses of the KJV for the whole word “purgatory”, any case, and found 0. The word is Latin in origin (purgatorium, “place of cleansing”) and came into use centuries after the Bible was written, so no translation, Catholic or Protestant, uses it. A missing word does not settle the doctrine either way: “Trinity” is also absent, and many Christians hold that teaching.
The similar-looking KJV words are about cleansing, not an afterlife state: “purge” 15 times, “purged” 14 times, “purgeth” once and “purging” once. “Limbo” also appears 0 times.
The passages Catholics cite
The Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraphs 1030–1032) teaches purgatory as a final purification of those who die in God’s friendship, and points to these texts:
- 2 Maccabees 12:39–46: Judas Maccabeus has prayers and a sacrifice offered for fallen soldiers, “that they might be delivered from sin” (12:46). 2 Maccabees is in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in the 66-book Protestant canon, so it is outside this KJV text (the 1611 KJV printed it among the Apocrypha).
- 1 Corinthians 3:15: “he himself shall be saved; yet so as by fire.”
- Matthew 12:32: sin that “shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come.”
Protestant churches reject purgatory, reading 1 Corinthians 3 as the testing of a believer’s work, not a place, and pointing to passages such as Hebrews 9:27 and Luke 23:43. Orthodox churches pray for the dead but do not define purgatory as the Catholic Church does. This page reports the count; it does not decide between these readings.
Check the count yourself
Or recount from scratch. Download count-words.py and run it with Python 3:
python count-words.py --output-dir results
It uses only Python’s standard library, downloads the pinned KJV file, checks its SHA-256 (0c3b8afefa4efaa8bd72576682c8ad060e4ccb499e81943a9678de49ab9416ad) and writes every CSV and the method JSON. The KJV text was imported from aruljohn/Bible-kjv; its exact printing is unknown. Only verse text is counted: no headings, notes or Apocrypha.
To count another word with the same rule, use the Bible word counter.
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