to compile: to draw up and set an account in orderly sequence
This verb appears exactly once in the entire New Testament, in the opening sentence of Luke's Gospel, where Luke says that many people had undertaken to do this with an account of the events fulfilled among them. Because it occurs only here, everything we can say about its shade of meaning has to be pieced together from a small handful of uses outside the Bible.
The core idea is putting written material together in order. The verb is built from a common word meaning to arrange or draw up in ranks, so at its root it carries the sense of setting things in their proper sequence. Nearly every modern translation renders Luke's phrase as something like to draw up or compile an orderly account, and most scholars treat the word as a close cousin of the ordinary Greek word for composing or arranging a piece of writing.
What is genuinely debated is the extra shade the prefix adds. Some read it as simply to compile; a minority tradition heard in it the idea of going back over material and reproducing it from memory; and a newer line of study, drawing on ancient business documents and inscriptions, hears the flavor of drawing up a written list or record. These readings shift what Luke implies about the people who wrote before him, but they agree on the broad meaning: to put a written account together in order.
Disputed
What ἀνατάξασθαι means in Luke 1:1, given that the verb is a New Testament hapax with a very thin extra-biblical record and a prefix (ἀνά) that could carry spatial, iterative, or serial force.
- majorityCompile / draw up an orderly narrative: ordinary Hellenistic book-production vocabulary, roughly equivalent to συντάσσω, with the prefix adding a mild in-order nuance or none at all. The object διήγησις (a connected narrative) and the parallel καθεξῆς γράψαι in v. 3 tilt the sense this way.; BDAG, s.v. ἀνατάσσω; Louw & Nida, 62.3; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (Anchor Bible), 1981
- minorityRehearse / reproduce from memory: the prefix taken iteratively (again, anew), anchored on Plutarch's rehearsing elephant (Mor. 968CD) and Irenaeus on Ezra restoring the Scriptures (Adv. Haer. 3.21.2). Traced to Blass and largely rejected today, since Luke's predecessors were not restoring any fixed prior text.; Moulton & Milligan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament, s.v. ἀνατάσσω; Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, s.v. ἀνατάσσω
- minoritySet out in a written list or register: a bureaucratic sense argued from documentary papyri and inscriptions unknown to the older lexica, implying Luke's predecessors produced list-like memoranda that he alone develops into a connected narrative. Not yet absorbed into the standard lexica.; John A. L. Lee & G. H. R. Horsley, Filologia Neotestamentaria 11, 1998; Kyriakoula Papademetriou, Estudios Biblicos 74, 2016