apolutrōsis

The lexica register two senses: BDAG gives both "buying back a captive by payment of ransom" (with Plutarch, Josephus, and Philo) and "release from a captive condition, deliverance," while Louw-Nida deliberately files the noun in the domain of release and setting free rather than in that of transfer or exchange, where the simple noun for a ransom price sits. Outside the New Testament the noun is rare but always involves an actual payment; its single Septuagint occurrence, however (Old Greek Daniel 4, of Nebuchadnezzar's recovery from madness), means restoration with no price at all, and the Greek Old Testament's use of the wider redemption vocabulary for the Exodus, where God pays no one, had already loosened the commercial edge. Two Hebrew verbs stand behind that background: padah, to ransom by an assessed sum, and gaal, the kinsman-redeemer's buying back of family. The modern debate runs from Warfield and Leon Morris (The Apostolic Preaching of the Cross), who held that a price is always present, through Buechsel (TDNT) and David Hill (Greek Words and Hebrew Meanings), who argued the word had broadened to simple deliverance, to I. Howard Marshall, whose distinction between a price (paid to a captor) and a cost (spent by the redeemer) is now widely followed: the word can carry either weight, and context decides. Deissmann's celebrated parallel with the sacral manumission of slaves at Delphi shows how Gentile hearers might take the term but is no longer treated as the controlling background. Commentators agree the New Testament never specifies to whom any ransom is paid.