TrustBible Research · Published 2026-09-30 · Updated 2026-09-30 · 9 min read

How many times does the Bible say “fear not”?

The exact phrase “fear not” appears in 62 KJV verses; widen it to “be not afraid” and you get 88. Every count with its rule attached, 和合本 counts, the full verse list, a downloadable dataset, and why the “365 times” claim fails the arithmetic.

Short answer: there is no single number — and that is the actual finding. In the King James Version the exact phrase "fear not" appears in 62 verses. Widen it to "fear not" OR "be not afraid" and you get 88 verses. Add the inflected forms ("feared not", "feareth not") and you reach 70 for "fear not" alone — one short of the 71 that circulates online. Each of those is correct under its own rule, which is why published counts for the same book differ by a factor of more than three.

The claim that "fear not" appears 365 times — one for every day of the year — does not survive the arithmetic. The word "fear" itself occurs 400 times in the KJV (501 verses if you include every inflected form of the stem, from feared and feareth to fearfulness). A sub-phrase of a word cannot occur more often than a separate figure the same width, and nothing in the text produces 365.

What follows is the count with the rule attached to every number, the full verse list, and a downloadable dataset so you can check all of it yourself.

How many times does the Bible say "fear not"?

Here are the counts, each tied to the exact phrase that produces it. A verse is counted once per rule, however many times the phrase repeats inside it.

Two things in that table are worth pausing on.

"Do not fear" returns zero in the KJV. Not a small number — zero. The KJV is Early Modern English; it says "fear not", never "do not fear". Search a modern translation and you get the reverse: many "do not fear", few "fear not". Anyone who quotes a count without naming the translation is quoting a fact about spelling, not about the Bible.

"Fear thou not" and "be not dismayed" are separate lines, not footnotes. Other counters fold them into a total. Folding is exactly where published numbers start to diverge, so they are listed on their own.

Why people say 71 (and why 71 is not wrong either)

The most-quoted figure for the KJV is 71, from Brett Maragni's study, widely repeated in the pages that debunk the 365 claim. Counting the exact phrase returns 62. That leaves nine verses unaccounted for, so the difference has to come from somewhere.

It comes from inflection. If you count fear with any ending followed by not, you pick up eight more verses:

Read the last column. Seven of those eight verses are the opposite of "do not be afraid." They are accusations that someone failed to fear God, and counted as "fear not" verses they inflate a word of comfort with a word of rebuke — Luke 18:2, the unjust judge, lands in the same bucket as Isaiah 41:10, "fear not, for I am with thee." Psalm 78:53 is the exception that proves the point: "he led them on safely, so that they feared not" is a statement that Israel was unafraid, which is exactly the sense the other seven invert. It is why the eight are reported as a separate line and never merged into the 62. A literal count cannot tell comfort from rebuke; only reading each verse can.

So: 62 exact + 8 inflected = 70, one short of 71. That is as far as the text takes you. The outstanding verse is unattributable from the corpus alone — it depends on a counting choice Maragni's page does not state. Which is the whole problem: 71 is not a false number, it is an undocumented one. Its rule is not published, so nobody can re-run it.

The same page reports that "fear" occurs 501 times in the KJV. That number is reproducible: match the stem fear* against a word boundary and you get 501 verses. The stem reaches wider than the five forms usually quoted — fear, feared, feareth, fearful and fearing between them cover 492 of those 501 verses — so the same rule also admits fearest, fearfully, fearfulness and the plural fears. Here is the same page reproducing two of the figures its competitors publish, from the same corpus, in one pass.

Why the 365 claim fails the arithmetic

The slogan is usually defended by widening the net: if "fear not" alone is too few, count every verse about fear, or every command against it. That move overshoots in both directions.

• "Fear" itself: 400 occurrences across 385 verses in the KJV.
• "Fear" with any ending: 524 occurrences across 501 verses.

A count of "fear not" statements cannot exceed the count of "fear". 365 sits below 400, so it is not arithmetically impossible — but it sits above every defensible sub-phrase count, and below it there is no natural boundary that lands on 365. People who have tried to get there by widening report reaching 109 (NASB), 110 (ESV), 111 (NKJV) and 91 (NIV), and beyond that "no standard English translation of the Bible contains that number" — because 365 was never a count. It is a devotional device, and it works better as one.

There is a second check nobody uses. If "fear not" were one-per-day, it would be spread evenly across all 66 books. It is not. In the KJV, 29 of the 66 books contain at least one "fear not" or "be not afraid" verse, and 37 contain none at all — no Romans, no Ephesians, no Philippians, no Hebrews, no James, no Job. Isaiah alone carries 11; Luke 9; Genesis 7. That is the shape of pastoral response to specific moments, not a calendar.

The count in Chinese: 和合本

Chinese translations cannot be counted with the English rule, so they get their own — and they produce their own numbers, not a translation of the English ones.

The Chinese total is higher than the English union (102 against 88) for a structural reason, not because the Chinese Bible says more. 和合本 uses 不要, a single negative-imperative particle that attaches to 怕 (fear), 惧怕, 害怕 and 恐惧. The KJV splits the same idea across "fear not", "be not afraid" and vocabulary the two-word rule never sees. The two counts are not the same measurement, and this page never adds them together.

The 和合本 figure is also the least-covered number on the English web. The English claim has a decade of blog posts arguing about it; the Chinese claim has almost nothing in a citable form.

Why published numbers differ

Every disagreement about this count comes down to one of four choices. None of them is a mistake; not stating them is.

That last row is the one nobody performs. It is why Luke 18:2 counts as a "fear not" verse in some totals.

Download the data

• CSV: /data/fear-not-counts.csv — one row per matching verse, per rule, both languages, with book, chapter, verse and full text
• JSON: /data/fear-not-counts.json — the same rows plus the complete methodology metadata

Both are generated from the Bible text by a single reproducible script (scripts/generate-fear-not-counts.ts in the TrustBible repository), using the same corpora as our Bible chapter reading times dataset. Re-run the script and you get the same numbers.

Methodology

Corpus. King James Version, 31,102 verses (data/kjv.jsonl.gz), and the Chinese Union Version, simplified, 31,100 verses (data/cuv-simplified.jsonl). Both are the complete Protestant canon.

Counting rule. A verse counts once per rule if its text matches that rule's phrase, case-insensitively, as literal text. No lemmatisation, no stemming, no synonym expansion. A verse repeating the phrase still counts once.

What is not merged. Rules are reported separately and never silently combined into one headline figure. The union rows exist so you can see what merging produces — they are the only place two rules are added, and they are labelled as unions.

Unit. Verses, not occurrences. For "fear not" the two are identical (62 and 62), so the unit is not what separates this count from the published 71.

Why this page exists (first-party search evidence)

Google Search Console, property trustbible.org, first weeks after indexing (2026-09-07 → 2026-09-28): 1 click, 32 impressions, average position 58.5. Every visible query is a bare book-and-chapter lookup — galatians 1, ezra 1, 希伯来书11章, 箴言第3章 — and the only question-form query is "where is galatians in the bible" at position 80.

No query on this property mentions fear, anxiety, or the 365 claim. This page is not built on measured demand from our own traffic, because there is none yet. It is built on a measurable gap in what search engines and answer engines currently return for the question: the cited sources give 71, ~110 and "more than 365", none of them with a rule you can re-run.

How this compares to existing pages

Known limits of this dataset

• Two translations only. These counts apply to the KJV and 和合本 exactly. The 109/110/111/91 figures reported elsewhere are for NASB, ESV, NKJV and NIV, which this page does not ship and therefore cannot reproduce — they are cited as reported, not verified here.
• Literal matching, no semantics. The rule is text matching, so a verse that means "do not be afraid" without using one of the listed phrases is not counted, and a rebuke that uses the phrase is counted unless you apply the semantic filter the last section describes.
• Verses, not occurrences. Where a verse repeats the phrase, it still counts once for that rule. For most rules on this page occurrences and verses are equal or nearly so; the two exceptions are be not afraid (28 occurrences in 26 verses) and 不要怕 (37 occurrences in 33 verses). The CSV carries per-verse rows so you can recount by occurrences if you prefer.
• The underlying languages are not counted. Hebrew and Greek have their own vocabulary for fear, and a count of English or Chinese phrases is not a count of the original commands. That question needs a tagged Hebrew/Greek text, which this dataset does not include.

Where to go next

• If fear is the thing you are actually carrying, the fear topic pairs Isaiah 41:10 — one of the 88 verses counted above — with a short prayer and a next step.
• For anxiety specifically, What does the Bible say about anxiety? walks the same terrain as a practice rather than a count.
• For the counting method, the per-chapter reading times dataset uses the same two corpora and the same disclosure rules.

Frequently asked questions

How many times does the Bible say "fear not"? In the King James Version the exact phrase "fear not" occurs in 62 verses: 48 in the Old Testament and 14 in the New. Widen the rule to "fear not" or "be not afraid" and the total is 88 verses. There is no single number without a rule.

Is it true that the Bible says "fear not" 365 times? No. 365 is a devotional slogan relayed as a statistic. Counting "fear" itself in the KJV gives 400 occurrences across 385 verses, so a phrase inside those verses cannot plausibly land on exactly one per day — and 37 of the 66 books contain no "fear not" verse at all.

Why do some sources say 71 times? 71 counts fear with any ending followed by not, not the exact phrase. The exact phrase gives 62; adding "feared not" and "feareth not" gives 70. Seven of the eight inflected verses describe people who did not fear God, so they are rebukes rather than words of comfort, and are listed separately here; the eighth, Psalm 78:53, is a statement that Israel was unafraid after God rescued them.

How many times does the 和合本 say 不要怕? 33 verses contain 不要怕, 49 contain 不要惧怕, 19 contain 不要害怕 and 3 contain 不要恐惧. Counting all four together gives 102 verses, 78 in the Old Testament and 24 in the New.

Which Bible translation has the most "fear not"? That question has no answer without fixing the phrase first, because translations use different words for the same command. The KJV contains zero instances of "do not fear" — it always says "fear not" — so a search that works in a modern translation returns nothing here.

Is the count different in Hebrew and Greek? Yes, and this dataset does not measure it. Counting English or Chinese phrases measures the translation, not the underlying text. The commands exist in Hebrew and Greek with their own vocabulary, and counting them needs a tagged original-language corpus.