Words from the Greek and Hebrew that carry more freight than any single English rendering can hold. Each entry is what the word meant in ordinary use, what it does in Scripture, and where to read it.
5 words
apologia
a defense, a reasoned answer
A formal, reasoned reply, the kind a defendant gives in court. It is not an apology in the modern sense of expressing regret. When Peter tells believers to be ready to give an apologia for their hope, he is asking for a case, made with gentleness and respect, not a mood.
Where to read it
baptizō
to immerse, dip, submerge
Outside the New Testament the word describes sinking a ship, dyeing cloth, or plunging something under water. The mode is built into the word, which is why the practice of the early church was immersion, and why Romans 6 can speak of being buried and raised with Christ as a picture of what the rite depicts.
Where to read it
ekklēsia
assembly, gathering, congregation, church
In ordinary Greek an ekklēsia was simply a summoned assembly, the body of citizens called together to transact public business. There is nothing religious in the word itself, and Scripture uses it that way: the rioting crowd in the theater at Ephesus is an ekklēsia three times over, and the city clerk tells them to take their grievance to the regular assembly instead.
The Septuagint had already put the word to covenantal use, rendering the Hebrew qahal, the assembled congregation of Israel. That is the sense the New Testament inherits, and Hebrews makes the continuity explicit by quoting Psalm 22:22 with ekklēsia on Christ’s lips: he sings God’s praise in the midst of the congregation.
In the New Testament it works at two scales. It names a particular congregation in a particular place, including one small enough to meet in a house, and it names the whole body of the redeemed under Christ as head. Both are ordinary usage, and context decides which is in view.
It rarely stands alone
Because the noun carries no Christian content of its own, the New Testament almost always says which assembly it means. The qualifier can name the owner, the church of God at Corinth, or the place, the church in Corinth, or the people themselves, the church of the Thessalonians. It pluralizes just as readily: Paul writes to the churches of Galatia, relays greetings from all the churches of Christ, and holds up the churches of God in Judea as the pattern the Thessalonians followed. One word has to cover a single congregation, a region full of them, and a pagan town meeting, so the qualifier is doing real work. Where it does stand bare, the context has already named the assembly in view, as in Ephesians 5, where the one who loves it is Christ.
A caution on etymology
The popular gloss “the called-out ones,” built from ek (out of) plus kaleō (to call), preaches well and is not how the word functions. Etymology is not meaning. A word means what its users use it to mean, and by the first century ekklēsia meant assembly, which is why a pagan mob in Ephesus qualifies. The doctrine of a people called out of the world is thoroughly biblical, but it rests on passages that teach it, not on the parts of this noun.
Where to read it
Related
katechō
to hold down, restrain, suppress, hold fast
Kata (down) joined to echō (to have or hold), so the root picture is holding something down. It runs in two directions depending on context: holding fast to what is good, and holding down what one would rather not face. The second is the sense in Romans 1:18, where men suppress the truth, and the word carries a weight the reading has to reckon with, since you cannot hold down what you never had.
Where to read it
Related
logizomai
to reckon, count, credit, impute
An accounting term: to enter an amount in a ledger. It is the word Paul leans on through Romans 4, where it appears eleven times, and it sits naturally beside the wage and debt language of verse 4. What is credited is precisely what was not earned, which is why the Reformed tradition speaks of righteousness being imputed rather than produced. Because it is one word, righteousness credited to the account and sin not charged against it are one act seen from two sides.
English versions vary the rendering and obscure the link: counted, credited, reckoned, imputed, taken into account. All of them are translating the same verb.
Where to read it
Related
No words match that search.
Lexical data follows Strong’s numbering; occurrence counts are the New Testament totals given in Strong’s concordance and vary slightly with the underlying text. Definitions are my own summaries, checked against standard lexicons.