agōnizomai

The lexica agree on the semantic range. BDAG divides the verb into engaging in an athletic contest (1 Cor 9:25), fighting with weapons (Jn 18:36), and figurative struggle of every kind (Lk 13:24; Col 1:29; 4:12; 1 Tim 4:10; 6:12; 2 Tim 4:7). LSJ documents the same spread across classical and Hellenistic usage, where the verb belongs first to the games and then extends to courtroom, military and philosophical contention. Louw and Nida distribute it over three semantic domains: combat (39.30), athletic competition (50.1) and strenuous effort (68.74). Stauffer's TDNT article treats the whole word group under the image of the contest and traces its moral and religious application through Hellenistic Judaism into the Pauline corpus.

The live scholarly question concerns the background of the imagery rather than the sense of the word. V. C. Pfitzner argued that Paul's contest language draws less on the stadium than on the broader Hellenistic tradition of the moral struggle, in which the sage or the missionary is the contestant; many commentators on 1 Corinthians and on the Pastoral Epistles continue to read a direct athletic metaphor, particularly where the wreath, the course and the rules stand in the immediate context. Neither reading alters what the verb denotes. The construction in 1 Tim 6:12 and 2 Tim 4:7, in which the verb governs its own cognate noun, is a standard Greek figure and is handled as such in the critical commentaries on the Pastorals.