He Used 'Mammon' Only Four Times

Across the four gospels, Jesus uses the Aramaic loanword 'mammon' exactly four times — and all four occur within two short passages: the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:24) and the conclusion of the Parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:9, 16:11, 16:13). The word never appears in Mark or John. In every instance, mammon is personified or treated as a rival power: 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon' (Matthew 6:24, Luke 16:13); 'the mammon of unrighteousness' (Luke 16:9, 16:11). Jesus never uses the ordinary Greek word for money (argyrion) or wealth (ploutos) as the subject of these warnings. Instead he reaches for a term — likely from Aramaic māmōnā, meaning 'that in which one trusts' — that frames accumulated wealth not as a neutral resource but as a competing object of loyalty. The clustering is striking: three of the four uses land within five verses of Luke 16, suggesting that Luke preserves a teaching unit where mammon is the controlling term. The Matthew instance is formally identical to Luke 16:13, almost word for word, raising the possibility that both draw on a shared source in which the mammon saying was the climax. What is unmistakable in the red letters themselves is that Jesus never deploys the word casually — each use is the conclusion or pivot of a larger argument about divided allegiance.