to carry or lead someone or something up to a higher place
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
At its plainest the word simply tracks motion upward. It joins the ordinary Greek verb for carrying (φέρω) to a prefix meaning "up," so whatever is moved ends higher than it started: a person, an animal, a load.
The New Testament uses it this way three times. Jesus brings Peter, James and John up a high mountain, where his appearance is transformed in front of them. At the close of Luke he himself is lifted into heaven while he is still blessing his disciples, and Luke never says who lifted him, which is a quiet way of saying that God did.
Everything else this word does grows out of that picture. A gift carried up onto an altar and a load hoisted onto someone's shoulders are both upward movements, and one verb covers them all.
Nuances
1ato bring or lead people up onto high ground
Mat 17:1Mrk 9:2
1bto be lifted up into heaven
Luk 24:51
2
to offer something up to God as a sacrifice
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures used this verb constantly for putting a sacrifice on the altar. It stood in for a Hebrew verb (עָלָה) whose basic idea is going up, and which is also the ordinary word for bringing an offering up onto the altar. New Testament writers inherited that habit, and in their hands the word keeps its direction: the gift is raised, laid on the altar, and sent up. That is what sets it apart from the commoner word for sacrificing (προσφέρω), which pictures bringing a gift before God without saying anything about lifting it.
What gets offered up widens quickly:
the daily animal sacrifices of the old priesthood, and then Christ offering himself once for all
Isaac, laid by Abraham on the altar
the lives of believers, called spiritual sacrifices
praise, described as the fruit of lips that confess God's name
The last two shape how the New Testament talks about worship. A word for hoisting a slaughtered animal onto an altar is used, without apology, for words spoken in gratitude, which puts ordinary praise in the same category as the offerings of the temple.
Nuances
2ato offer up a sacrificial victim: an animal on the altar, or a person given in its place
Heb 7:27 (2×)Jas 2:21
2bto bring God an offering that is not an animal: a life, or praise
Heb 13:151Pe 2:5
3
to take the weight of other people's sins onto oneself and carry it
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested
Twice the New Testament uses this verb with sins as the thing carried, and both times it is echoing the Greek version of Isaiah 53, where the suffering servant bore the sins of many. Guilt is pictured as a load that one person shoulders in the place of others.
What makes these two verses hard is that the word can be heard two ways at once. Peter writes that Christ carried our sins in his body up onto the tree, which can mean either taking a burden away, as in Isaiah, or carrying an offering up onto an altar, with the cross standing in for the altar. Both readings are defended by serious scholars, and the words alone do not rule either out. Hebrews sets the two ideas side by side in one sentence: Christ was brought as an offering once (προσφέρω) in order to bear the sins of many.
The difference is not idle. Bearing sins stresses that the guilt was really taken up by someone else; carrying them off stresses that it was disposed of. The New Testament writers seem content to let both stand together.
Heb 9:28*1Pe 2:24*
1Pe 2:24
What the verb means in 1 Peter 2:24: bearing sins as a load, or carrying them up onto the cross as a sacrifice laid on an altar.
majorityThe verb means "bore": Christ took the load of guilt upon himself, in the wording of Isaiah 53:12 in Greek, and "onto the tree" says where he was when he bore it.; BDAG, s.v. ἀναφέρω
minorityThe verb keeps its sacrificial sense, "offered up": Christ carried the sins up onto the cross as a victim is carried up onto an altar.; E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Peter
keeps the physical picture of the gift being lifted and laid on the altar, so an act of movement is described and not just a presentationJas 2:21Heb 7:27
Both
both name the act of bringing something to God as a gift meant to be accepted1Pe 2:5Heb 13:15
Only offer
in everyday English "offer" often means no more than proposing something, which can be declined and costs the giver nothing
“offer up”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
Most often means bringing a person to someone for help, as the sick and the demon-troubled are carried to Jesus.Mat 4:24Mat 9:2Mrk 10:13
Covers presenting an object or gift to a recipient, from the wise men's treasures to the coin handed over for inspection.Mat 2:11Mat 22:19
Is the ordinary word for presenting an offering before God at the altar, the standard verb for the priest's daily service.Mat 5:24Heb 5:1Heb 8:3
ἀναλαμβάνωtaking someone or something up and along with you, and the usual word for Jesus being taken up into heaven; it never means offering a sacrifice.
It can mean carrying a load upward rather than escorting a traveler, and the load the New Testament gives it is sin: Christ takes other people's sins up onto himself and up onto the cross.1Pe 2:24Heb 9:28
It is the standing worship word for lifting an offering up to God, and Hebrews and 1 Peter build their whole picture of priesthood on it: what a priest does day after day, and what the church now does with praise and with its own life.Heb 7:27Heb 13:151Pe 2:5
Both
Both describe taking people up to a higher place, with the mover in charge and the others following: the Spirit takes Jesus up into the wilderness and the devil takes him up to a viewpoint, while Jesus takes the three disciples up a high mountain.Mat 4:1Luk 4:5Mat 17:1Mrk 9:2
Both can be rendered "offered up" of a sacrifice raised onto an altar, so the offering sense is not the private property of either word: Israel brings a sacrifice up to the golden calf with one, Abraham puts Isaac on the altar with the other.Act 7:41Jas 2:21
It is the settled New Testament word for a ship putting out from harbor, where "up" has nothing to do with height: the crew simply stands out to sea and the voyage begins.Luk 8:22Act 13:13Act 16:11Act 21:1Act 27:2Act 27:4Act 28:11
It can mean bringing someone back up out of death, so it becomes a way of speaking about resurrection: no one has to go down and fetch Christ up from the deep, because God has already brought him up from the dead.Rom 10:7Heb 13:20
It is used of fetching a person and producing them in front of others, whether a prisoner hauled out to face a crowd, a guest brought inside a house, or a newborn taken to the temple to be presented.Act 12:4Act 16:34Act 9:39Luk 2:22
βαστάζωcarrying a weight or putting up with it, with no upward movement and no altar in the background.
Has upward movement built into it: leading people up a high mountain, or being taken up from the ground into heaven. The load does not just move, it goes higher.Mat 17:1Mrk 9:2Luk 24:51
The standard worship word for putting a gift up on an altar, so it is regularly rendered "offer" or "offer up": a priest's daily sacrifices, Abraham placing Isaac there, praise and the lives of believers presented to God the same way.Heb 7:27Heb 13:15Jas 2:211Pe 2:5
Both
Both can describe one person taking up another's sins or sicknesses so that the sufferer no longer carries them, and both put that load on the bearer's own body.Heb 9:281Pe 2:24Mat 8:17
The everyday word for hauling ordinary things and helpless people from one place to another: a water jar through the city, a dead man on his bier, stones snatched up to throw, a lame beggar set down at the temple gate, a prisoner lifted clear of a mob.Mrk 14:13Luk 7:14Jhn 10:31Act 3:2Act 21:35
Stretches from carrying a weight to putting up with one, so it is often rendered "bear" in the sense of endure: a long day's heat and labor, a rule nobody could live under, the failings of weaker believers, each other's troubles, even people a church cannot stomach.Mat 20:12Act 15:10Rom 15:1Gal 6:2Rev 2:3
Used for what a person carries around as a lasting assignment or badge: a commission to take a name to the nations, and scars on the body that show whose servant he is.Act 9:15Gal 6:17
anapherō in the other biblical languages
עָלָהHebrew“to ascend: rise”the Hebrew verb for going up, also used for bringing an offering up onto the altar; the Greek Old Testament regularly renders it with this word, which is where the sacrificial sense comes from.
Is mostly confined to the sacrificial act of offering up, and the New Testament turns it toward the cross: Christ offering himself once for all, bearing sins up onto the tree. The breadth of motion in the Hebrew verb is gone, leaving the focused "offer up".Heb 7:271Pe 2:24
Keeps a literal "lead up" for going up a mountain, as when Jesus leads the disciples up the mount of transfiguration, but even this is a small, specific use rather than a general word for ascending.Mat 17:1Mrk 9:2
Both
Both name the sacrificial act of sending an offering up on the altar to God. The Greek verb is a regular Old Testament rendering of this branch of the Hebrew word, so the temple sacrifice language and the spiritual sacrifices of praise stand in continuity.Gen 8:20Heb 13:15
Is first of all a verb of motion: a person or thing physically goes up, climbs, marches up to a city, rises like smoke or water. The sacrificial "offer up" is one branch of a wide everyday word.Exo 19:3Gen 13:1
Covers the whole upward range, including bringing or leading people up, as God brought Israel up out of Egypt. The Greek verb is narrow by comparison and does not reach this travel and exodus language.Exo 3:17Psa 122:4
נָשָׂאHebrew“to lift: bear”the Hebrew verb for lifting and carrying, used in Isaiah 53 of the servant who bore the sins of many, the verse that stands behind the sin-bearing use here.
The regular word for putting an offering up where God receives it, whether an animal, a son bound on the wood, or praise spoken aloud.Heb 7:27Jas 2:21Heb 13:151Pe 2:5
Used of leading people up a slope: Jesus takes the three disciples up the high mountain, so the word describes a climb made together rather than a load hoisted.Mat 17:1Mrk 9:2
Both
Both bear sin as a load laid on someone: Isaiah says the Servant "bore" the sin of many and carried the sorrows of others, and the New Testament states the same thing about Christ with the Greek word.Isa 53:12Isa 53:4Lev 16:22Heb 9:281Pe 2:24
Both describe carrying a person bodily upward and away: God bears Israel on eagles' wings, and Jesus is carried up into heaven.Exo 19:4Luk 24:51
Covers the ordinary bodily gesture of raising a part of oneself: the eyes toward a landscape, the heart and hands toward God, the head of a city gate flung open.Gen 13:10Lam 3:41Psa 24:7
Reaches all the way to pardon: when the thing carried is a wrong, carrying it becomes taking it away, so the same word is rendered "forgive" of a brother's offence and of God's own dealing with guilt.Gen 50:17Exo 34:7Mic 7:18
Serves plain everyday hauling with no religious weight at all: camels loaded with spices, an idol hoisted onto a shoulder, a nurse carrying a small child.Gen 37:25Isa 46:7Num 11:12
Upward movement is built into the Greek word, so it works where no load and no wrongdoing is in view at all: Jesus takes the three disciples up a high mountain, and at the end of Luke he himself is taken up into heaven. The Hebrew verb never carries this sense of going up.Mat 17:1Mrk 9:2Luk 24:51
It is the ordinary word for putting a sacrifice up on the altar, which is where most of its New Testament uses sit: the priests offering victims day after day, and Abraham offering Isaac. The Hebrew word for bearing a load has no altar image anywhere.Heb 7:27Jas 2:21
Because it belongs to worship, it stretches to gifts that have no weight whatever: praise spoken with the lips is a sacrifice offered up, and so are the lives of ordinary believers described as a priesthood.Heb 13:151Pe 2:5
Both
Both words are used for taking on the guilt of other people as a real weight, not merely wiping it away. Isaiah says the servant will bear the iniquities of the many, and Lamentations has a generation carrying the iniquities of their fathers; Hebrews says Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many, and 1 Peter says he bore our sins in his own body up onto the tree. The New Testament writers are reaching for the same picture in Greek that Isaiah drew in Hebrew.Isa 53:11Lam 5:7Heb 9:281Pe 2:24
It is the word of hard hauling labor, with nothing lifted toward God: a shoulder bent under a pack until the man becomes forced labor, and cattle described as laden. This is drudgery, not worship.Gen 49:15Psa 144:14
Isaiah turns the word into a test of who is real: an idol has to be hauled on its worshippers' shoulders and set down where it cannot move, while the God of Israel says that he is the one who will carry his people on into their gray hairs.Isa 46:7Isa 46:4
Pain and bodily wearing down are weights this word can name: the servant carries the sicknesses and sorrows that were ours, and in the picture of old age even a locust has turned into something too heavy to manage.Isa 53:4Ecc 12:5
What scholars say about anapherō
Standard lexicography divides ἀναφέρω into three senses: causing motion to a higher position (Matt 17:1;Mark 9:2; and the passive of Luke 24:51, of the ascension), offering up sacrificially (Heb 7:27; 13:15; Jas 2:21;1 Pet 2:5), and taking up and carrying away, used with ἁμαρτίας (1 Pet 2:24;Heb 9:28); so BDAG, with LSJ supplying the classical range, which already includes "take upon oneself, endure." The sacrificial sense is a Septuagintalism: ἀναφέρω regularly renders the causative of עלה for the presentation of burnt offerings, and Hebrews deploys it alongside the more frequent προσφέρω, most visibly at 9:28, where προσενεχθείς and ἀνενεγκεῖν stand in a single clause. The sin-bearing use rests on Isaiah 53:12 LXX (τὰς ἁμαρτίας αὐτῶν αὐτὸς ἀνοίσει), echoed at 1 Peter 2:24 and Hebrews 9:28. Commentators divide over 1 Peter 2:24: whether ἀνήνεγκεν is Isaianic burden-bearing, with ἐπὶ τὸ ξύλον locating the event, or sacrificial offering-up, with the cross figured as an altar. Commentators on Hebrews place its usage within the cultic vocabulary inherited from the Greek Old Testament rather than treating it as an independent coinage.
Sources
BDAG (Bauer, Danker, Arndt, Gingrich), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed., s.v. ἀναφέρωlexicon
Liddell, Scott and Jones, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed., s.v. ἀναφέρωlexicon
Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, s.v. φέρω and its compounds, vol. 9dictionary
Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Horst Balz and Gerhard Schneider, s.v. ἀναφέρωdictionary
New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis, ed. Moisés Silva, s.v. ἀναφέρωdictionary
Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia)commentary
Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews (New International Greek Testament Commentary)commentary
Paul J. Achtemeier, 1 Peter (Hermeneia)commentary
J. Ramsey Michaels, 1 Peter (Word Biblical Commentary 49)commentary
E. G. Selwyn, The First Epistle of St. Petercommentary