apotithēmi

This is the plain, physical root of the word: to strip off a piece of clothing and put it to one side. In the New Testament it surfaces this way only once, when the men who stoned Stephen took off their outer cloaks and laid them at the feet of a young man named Saul, freeing their arms for the work of throwing stones.

The form of the verb is reflexive: the subject takes the garment off himself. That small detail matters, because this everyday act of shedding a coat is the picture the New Testament writers later reach for again and again when they speak of shedding a way of life. Everything figurative the word goes on to do grows out of this simple image of laying a garment aside.

Alongside the clothing sense, the word carries an ordinary administrative meaning found throughout everyday Greek of the period: to put something, or someone, away in a place for keeping. Applied to a person, that means placing them under guard.

The New Testament uses it this way once, of Herod putting John the Baptist in prison. There is no metaphor here and no moral coloring; it is the plain language a clerk might use for filing a document or a jailer for locking up a prisoner. It shares with the other senses the basic idea of setting something down and away, but here what is set away is a person, and the place is a cell.

This is the word's most important and most frequent use in the New Testament. The everyday act of pulling off a soiled garment becomes a picture of moral change: the readers are told to strip off anger, lying, malice, and every filthy habit, and to be done with them for good. The image was already a familiar one in the wider Greek moral world, where teachers spoke of laying aside a passion as one lays aside a worn-out cloak; the New Testament writers took it up and tied it to the new life given in Christ.

The command comes in a form that pictures a single, decisive act rather than a slow drift, and the subject does it to himself: you take these things off. It is almost always paired with its opposite, the call to put something on, a word for clothing yourself (ἐνδύω), so the whole picture is one of a change of clothes, from an old and dirty set to a clean one.

What gets stripped off ranges from a single named fault to a person's entire former identity:

• specific vices and sinful habits, such as lying, anger, and malice
• the whole "old self," the person one used to be before coming to faith
• any weight or hindrance that slows a runner in a race

A stronger, more total form of the same picture (ἀπεκδύομαι, to strip off completely) stands nearby in some of these passages, underscoring that this shedding is meant to be thorough.