Open Questions

Which flower is meant by the lily of the field in the Sermon on the Mount?

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Which flower is meant by the lily of the field in the Sermon on the Mount?." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://www.divinityatlas.com/open-questions-index/which-flower-is-meant-by-the-lily-of-the-field-in-the-sermon-on-the-mount.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Which flower is meant by the lily of the field in the Sermon on the Mount?. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://www.divinityatlas.com/open-questions-index/which-flower-is-meant-by-the-lily-of-the-field-in-the-sermon-on-the-mount

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-which-flower-is-meant-by-the-lily-of-the,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Which flower is meant by the lily of the field in the Sermon on the Mount?},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://www.divinityatlas.com/open-questions-index/which-flower-is-meant-by-the-lily-of-the-field-in-the-sermon-on-the-mount},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Open Question

The Greek krinon is a general word for a showy flower rather than a botanical name. Anemone coronaria is the most commonly proposed candidate on grounds of what actually grows abundantly and conspicuously in Galilean fields, but Lilium candidum and several others remain in the running and the text gives no distinguishing detail.

What would resolve this Nothing in the text can settle it; the question would move only on evidence about which flowers were locally called krinon in first-century Galilean usage.

Resolution Sourcing note, 2026-07-25 (W4). Cited to Ball 2019, which was read in full on the Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center site. Lytton John Musselman's Plants of the Bible pages at Old Dominion University say the same thing more bluntly, that which plants Jesus is referring to is hard to say with certainty, and list the crown anemone, the common poppy and no specific plant as the three possibilities; that page was read but a university personal site was judged the weaker citation of the two.

OpenKoine Greek lexicography and Levantine field botany.Terry B. Ball, Plants in the New Testament

Cross-Tradition Connections