archē

This is the everyday sense and the most common one in the New Testament. It marks where a thing begins:

• the start of the world
• the first days of a movement
• the moment a person first knew something

The word can point all the way back to creation (the same word the Greek Old Testament uses to open Genesis, "in the beginning God created"), or it can mean something far more modest, like the early days of a friendship or the first lessons a new believer is taught.

Much of the time the start in view is recent and relative:

• the beginning of someone's public work
• the first time hearers were told a thing
• the opening of an account

So the word does not always carry cosmic weight. The reader has to ask which beginning the writer means: the beginning of all things, or simply the beginning of this particular story.

Where the New Testament does reach back to the very first beginning, it often does so to make a point about Jesus: that he was already there before creation started, not something that came into being once it was under way. The deliberate echo of the opening line of Genesis is doing theological work, not just dating an event.

Greek used this word not only for when a thing starts but for where it comes from: its source or origin, the one in whom it begins. This is more than being first in a line. It is being the wellspring the rest flows out of.

The New Testament reserves this charged sense for Jesus. Calling him the origin of God's creation, or the beginning paired with the end (τέλος), says he is not merely the earliest item in the created order but its source and its goal. This was the heart of a major early dispute (see the caution and the noted verses): some read the title as "first thing created," making Jesus a creature, while the church concluded it meant "source of creation," placing him on the Creator's side. The structured note on those verses lays out who held what.

The same word names rule itself and those who exercise it. In the plain civil sense it means the authorities, the magistrates, the people in charge, and believers are told to submit to them. It can also name the office or assigned post a being holds.

In several of Paul's letters the plural takes on a darker, larger meaning: spiritual powers behind the visible world, listed alongside authorities (ἐξουσία) and forces. Scholars debate exactly what these are: personal spirit beings, the unseen side of human institutions, or both. What every reading agrees on is the point Paul drives home: whatever these powers are, Christ created them, rules over them, and has already stripped them of their claim on his people.

In its most concrete, everyday use the word names the outermost edge or corner of a physical thing. In the New Testament this appears only in Peter's vision of a sheet let down from heaven, lowered by its four corners. There is no figurative weight here; it is simply the physical end of the cloth.