atimazō

The lexical tradition is stable. BDAG, LSJ, Louw-Nida (domain 87, status), and Schneider's article on the time word-group in TDNT 8:169-180 treat atimazo as the standard Attic and Koine verb formed on atimos, meaning to deprive of honor, to insult, or to treat with contempt. Schneider notes that the classical Athenian legal sense of atimia, the formal loss of civic rights, attached to the noun and to the specialized verb atimoo, and had ceased to be operative in first-century Koine; the documentary papyri collected by Moulton-Milligan show only the general sense of insult and indignity. Mark 12:4 is the one text-critical wrinkle, where part of the tradition reads a form of atimoo rather than this verb. The Septuagint background is dense: atimazo renders qalah and qalal (Deuteronomy 27:16; 1 Samuel 2:30) and nabel (Micah 7:6), and its passive stands behind the Servant who was despised in Isaiah 53:3, which supplies the substrate for the New Testament portrait of the shamed and vindicated Christ. Recent work reads the occurrences through the honor and shame framework of Malina and Neyrey, as refined by Crook's public court of reputation: Neyrey on John 8:49 within the Fourth Gospel's theology of the sent one, whose dishonor falls on the sender; deSilva's community-maintenance analysis of Acts 5:41, where the Sanhedrin's shaming ritual is re-encoded inside the group as an honor marker in the divine court; Jewett and Moxnes on the honor inversion running through Romans 1:24 and 2:23; and Davids, Allison, and Johnson on James 2:6 as a reversal of the honor owed the poor under Torah (Leviticus 19:15; Proverbs 14:21 in Greek).