to struggle face-to-face against an opponent, the way a wrestler or fighter grapples with an adversary
This verb appears only once in the New Testament, in Hebrews 12:4, where the writer tells his readers they have "not yet resisted to the point of blood in your struggle against sin." The picture is a contest: sin is imagined as a living opponent, and the believer is a wrestler or fighter grappling with it face-to-face.
The word belongs to the same family as the broader verb for competing or contending (ἀγωνίζομαι). The small piece added to the front points the struggle squarely at a named opponent, the way two wrestlers square off against each other. It is a close cousin of the verb for fighting an enemy down to defeat (καταγωνίζομαι), which Hebrews uses a chapter earlier for heroes who "conquered kingdoms"; but this word names the ongoing grapple itself, the grip and the strain of the match, rather than the victory that ends it.
The setting drives the meaning. The surrounding verses picture the Christian life as a race run before a great crowd of watching witnesses, with Jesus as both the model competitor and the finish line the runner keeps in view. Into that arena the writer sets sin as the adversary. The single closest parallel anywhere in the Greek Bible comes from 4 Maccabees, where a tyrant is cast as the "antagonist" wrestling the faithful in a public contest, and Hebrews places its own readers in that same ring.
Whether "to the point of blood" (mechris haimatos) in Hebrews 12:4 denotes the shedding of a martyr's blood in death or is an athletic idiom for a fighter bloodied by maximal exertion.
- majorityMartyrological: the readers, unlike Jesus (12:2) and the earlier witnesses (11:35-38), have not yet been called to die for their confession.; Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NIGTC, 1993), 643-44; Craig R. Koester, Hebrews (AB 36, 2001), 525; Peter T. O'Brien, The Letter to the Hebrews (Pillar, 2010), 460-61
- minorityAn athletic idiom: the bloodied boxer or wrestler pressed to the limit, a stock Greco-Roman picture of extreme effort (cf. Seneca, De Providentia 2.5-6).; Victor C. Pfitzner, Paul and the Agon Motif (NovTSup 16, Brill, 1967), 194
- contestedBoth registers deliberately at once, since 4 Maccabees had already fused martyrdom with the athletic contest.; Harold W. Attridge, Hebrews (Hermeneia, 1989), 361; William L. Lane, Hebrews 9-13 (WBC 47B, 1991), 413-14; N. Clayton Croy, Endurance in Suffering (SNTSMS 98, CUP, 1998), 180-84
Disputed
Whether the prefix on this compound verb gives it a special face-to-face, hand-to-hand force, or merely marks that the struggle is directed against an opponent.
- majorityThe compound is intensive, casting the readers as wrestlers or boxers engaging sin directly, hand-to-hand.; F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NICNT, rev. 1990), 340-42; Gareth Lee Cockerill, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NICNT, 2012), 617-18; Peter T. O'Brien, The Letter to the Hebrews (Pillar, 2010), 459-60
- minorityThe construction is ordinary Greek for opposing a defined enemy (as in the Priene inscription), so the prefix marks direction rather than added force.; Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NIGTC, 1993), 642-43; Herbert W. Smyth, Greek Grammar, sections 1683-91