weight: heaviness itself, whether it presses down on the person carrying it or simply gives a thing mass and substance
The word names heaviness. Greek writers used it for the literal weight of an object, and from there for anything that presses on a person: hard labor, expense, an obligation, a grief. The New Testament uses it in that ordinary way most of the time, and then does something surprising with it once.
Most of its uses are what you would expect:
- the workers in the vineyard complain that they carried the weight of the whole day and its heat
- Paul tells believers to carry one another's weights and so fulfill the law of Christ
- the Jerusalem council decides to place no further weight on Gentile Christians
- the risen Christ tells the faithful in Thyatira that he will lay no other weight on them
In those last two the word has become a near technical way of talking about religious requirements: a weight is a thing that people with authority can place on other people, or decline to place.
Then Paul turns the picture over. Writing to Corinth he sets a light and momentary trouble against an eternal weight of glory, so heaviness stops being the bad half of the comparison and becomes the good half. Glory is not thin or airy in this way of speaking. It has mass, it is solid, it outweighs everything set against it. Behind that is probably the Hebrew word for glory (כָּבוֹד), which is built on the picture of being heavy.
One use runs in yet another direction. In Greek a person could be said to have weight, meaning standing and influence, much as we say that someone's opinion carries weight. Paul appears to use it that way when he tells the Thessalonians what the apostles could have done and chose not to do.
Nuances
What the phrase translated "to be in weight" means in 1 Thessalonians 2:7: making a financial demand on the church, or insisting on apostolic importance.
- majorityIt means to press one's own weight, that is, to insist on the standing and authority that belong to an apostle. The money question is raised separately two verses later with a different word.; BDAG, s.v. βάρος; Abraham J. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians (Anchor Yale Bible 32B, Doubleday, 2000)
- minorityIt means to be a financial burden, weighing on the church for support, which is how the older lexicographical tradition and the King James Version took it and how the surrounding paragraph about working night and day reads most naturally.; Joseph Henry Thayer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament (T&T Clark, 1889), s.v. βάρος