agō

This is the everyday core of the word. One person makes another person, an animal, or a group move from where they are to somewhere else, usually traveling with them rather than just sending them off. The word says nothing on its own about whether the move is welcome or forced; the setting supplies that. So the same verb covers:

• a friend brought to meet Jesus
• a colt fetched for him to ride
• a prisoner marched to court

The senses below sort those occurrences by who or what is being moved and to what end. The most common picture is simply fetching or escorting someone to a place or a person. A large and distinct group is the legal one: being taken into custody and led off to a hearing, where the word becomes almost a technical term for arrest. A further group lifts the leading off the literal road and onto a journey toward a goal, such as God bringing his people a Savior or bringing his children all the way to glory.

What holds the senses together is the single act of conducting something along a path. Where the New Testament writers want the inward, unseen version of that act, they use the same verb in the passive, which is treated separately below as being guided or driven.

Here the leading is not down a road but through life. A person is moved from within:

• by the Spirit of God
• by their own cravings
• by a force they once followed blindly

The word keeps its core idea, one party setting the direction another travels, but the path is moral and spiritual rather than physical, and the one led is usually the grammatical subject acted upon.

The range runs from the highest use to the lowest. At one end, those whom the Spirit of God leads are called the children of God, and Jesus himself is led by the Spirit into the wilderness. At the other end, people are carried off by their own desires or were once swept along toward voiceless idols. God's kindness, too, is pictured as leading a person toward a change of heart.

This sense is set apart from the literal one because a reader needs a different shade of English, guided or driven rather than fetched or escorted, even though the underlying verb is the same. The good and the harmful versions share that shape: in each, a person's course is being set by something other than their own bare choice.

In a handful of places the verb has no object at all. The speaker is not leading anyone; the group simply gets up and moves. It is the ordinary call of someone on the road to companions: come on, let us be going. Jesus uses it to rouse his disciples in Gethsemane and to summon them back to dangerous Judea.

The English that fits is "go", not "lead" or "bring", which is why this counts as a genuinely different use rather than a shade of the first one. The verb that elsewhere means moving someone else here means moving oneself, the leader and the led collapsed into the same people. The tone is brisk and forward-looking, a decision to be on the way rather than a description of a destination.

Applied to time rather than to a person, the verb shifts to keeping track of or marking off a stretch of days. The idea of conducting something along is still faintly present, time being carried forward, but the natural English is "keep", "observe", or "reckon".

On the road to Emmaus the disciples say it is now being kept as the third day since the events they grieve, counting the days off. In Ephesus the town clerk says the courts are being held, using the same verb for the regular keeping of court sessions on appointed days. A reader who only knew the leading sense would be lost here, so this is treated as its own use.

In two places the single form ἄγε has frozen into an exclamation that no longer functions as a real verb of leading. It is thrown in front of a statement to seize the hearer's attention, much like the English "come now" or "look here". James uses it twice to confront the self-confident: come now, you who say you will go to such a city, and come now, you rich.

The word has stopped meaning "lead" or "bring"; it has become a particle of address. Treating it as its own use keeps a reader from forcing the leading idea onto a place where it does not belong. The force is rhetorical and a little sharp, a way of stopping the hearer in their tracks before the warning lands.