to give: to transfer something from one person to another, whether an object, a gift, a right, or a charge.
This is one of the most common verbs in the New Testament, and at heart it does one simple thing: it moves something from one party to another. What is handed over can be almost anything, which is why the same word covers:
- giving a coin
- giving the Holy Spirit
- paying a tax
- granting permission
- appointing an officer
- giving up one's own life
The thing transferred and the setting decide which English word fits best, but the underlying action stays the same.
The senses below are not different words. They are the natural range of one ordinary verb of giving, sorted by what is being given and to what end. English keeps several words for jobs this single Greek word does: we pay a debt, grant a request, yield a crop, appoint an officer, and put a thing in place, where the New Testament can use this one word for all of them. The Greek Old Testament had already stretched the word this far by using it to translate the Hebrew verb for giving, putting, and appointing (נתן), so several of its biblical patterns carry that wider, scriptural flavor.
Two uses carry real weight. When God or Jesus is the giver, the word often names grace freely bestowed rather than a transaction, and it becomes the steady refrain of the Gospel of John: the Father gives the Son, gives him his people, his words, and authority. The flip side is sacrificial: Jesus gives himself, gives his life as a ransom, in language nearly the same as the word for being handed over to death (παραδίδωμι). And in a frequent passive form, "it was given," the unnamed giver is understood to be God, so the word quietly states that the authority, the gift, or even the suffering in view comes from God's hand.
Nuances
Whether the unnamed giver of the Spirit without measure is God the Father (giving to the Son) or the Son (dispensing to believers).
- majorityThe Father gives the Spirit without measure to the Son; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John (PNTC); C. K. Barrett, The Gospel According to St. John, 2nd ed.
- minorityThe Son dispenses the Spirit to believers; Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John I-XII (Anchor Bible)
Whether the verb here means appoint (in the scriptural sense of installing a person in a role) or simply gave (the persons being Christ's gifts to the church).
- majorityThese are Christ's gifts to the church; the plain sense gave; Harold W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary; Peter T. O'Brien, The Letter to the Ephesians (PNTC); Andrew T. Lincoln, Ephesians (WBC)
- minorityChrist appointed some as apostles and prophets, in the scriptural sense; Markus Barth, Ephesians (Anchor Bible); Ernest Best, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Ephesians (ICC)