“Faith” or “Hope” in Hebrews 10:23?

"Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;)" (Hebrews 10:23, KJV)

Critics claim that “ελπιδος” should be translated as “hope” rather than “faith.” Since the KJV translates "ελπιδος" as "hope" in 43 other verses, it is certainly not the case that the KJV translators did not understand the meaning of the word. In the context of Hebrews 10:23, the KJV translators discerned that the meaning of "ελπιδος" is closer to "faith" than to "hope". There is a lot of semantic overlap between "hope" and "faith" even in English. “Hope” refers to an expectation based on faith. Not surprisingly, running “hope” through a thesaurus would give you “faith.” When a person says in English, "I lost hope in you", what is lost is faith rather than expectation. Hebrews 10:23 also has the parallelism between "our faith" and the fact that "he is faithful".

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