to exercise authority over another person, acting on one's own authority as their master
This verb appears only once in the whole Bible, in Paul's instruction about women and men in 1 Timothy 2:12, and that single appearance has made it one of the most argued words in the New Testament. Its basic sense is not really in doubt: it describes a person exercising authority over another person, acting as that person's master or on one's own say-so.
What is fiercely debated is the tone of that authority. In the everyday Greek of Paul's day the related noun meant "master," or "one who acts on his own authority," so the verb is not about killing or violence in origin, despite an old and now-abandoned claim that it once meant to murder. The real question is whether the word describes holding legitimate authority, the way an office-holder rightly leads, or seizing it and throwing one's weight around, closer to "domineer," "usurp," or "override."
The surviving evidence does not settle it. The word is rare, and the few examples from around Paul's time can be read either way. Paul had ordinary words available for legitimate authority and did not use them here, choosing instead this unusual, colloquial term, which many scholars take as a hint that something more forceful or self-assertive is meant. Others answer that a rare word need not carry a negative charge. Because the one verse touches directly on the modern discussion of women in church leadership, a confident English rendering in either direction claims more than the Greek by itself can prove.
Disputed
Whether the verb in 1 Timothy 2:12 denotes the ordinary, legitimate exercise of authority (neutral) or a self-arrogated, coercive one (pejorative: to domineer, usurp, or override the will of another). The pre-Pauline evidence for the verb is thin and underdetermines the answer, so the split tracks how one also reads the coordinating conjunction οὐδέ and the polemical situation in Ephesus.
- contestedA neutral or positive sense: to hold or exercise authority over, with no inherent negative overtone. It rests on the observation that every productive Koine derivative springs from αὐθέντης "master," and on the syntactic claim that the negated "teach ... nor αὐθεντεῖν" construction coordinates two like-valued activities, so a positive "teach" pairs with a positive "exercise authority."; George W. Knight III, 'ΑΥΘΕΝΤΕΩ in Reference to Women in 1 Timothy 2.12,' New Testament Studies 30 (1984): 143-157; H. Scott Baldwin, 'A Difficult Word: αὐθεντέω in 1 Timothy 2:12,' in Köstenberger, Schreiner & Baldwin (eds.), Women in the Church (Baker, 1995); Albert Wolters, 'A Semantic Study of αὐθέντης and its Derivatives,' Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 1 (2000): 145-175; BDAG, s.v. αὐθεντέω
- contestedA pejorative sense: to domineer, usurp, or override the will of another. It is pressed on the ground that Paul passed over the standard authority verbs (ἐξουσιάζω, ἄρχω, προΐστημι) for a rare, marked word, and that where the verb has a personal actor imposing on a personal target it regularly describes an imposition on a resistant or subordinate party.; Cynthia Long Westfall, 'The Meaning of αὐθεντέω in 1 Timothy 2.12,' Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 10 (2014): 138-173; Linda L. Belleville, 'Lexical Fallacies in Rendering αὐθεντεῖν in 1 Timothy 2:12,' Bulletin for Biblical Research 29 (2019); Philip B. Payne, Man and Woman, One in Christ (Zondervan, 2009); I. Howard Marshall, The Pastoral Epistles, International Critical Commentary (T&T Clark, 1999); Louw & Nida, Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament Based on Semantic Domains, §37.21