to tell something all the way through: to give the full, connected account of what happened rather than merely mention it
The word joins a verb meaning "to lead" with a prefix meaning "through." The picture is of leading a listener through a subject from one end to the other, so it is heavier than simply saying a thing. It means telling the whole of it, in order, until the hearer has the account.
Most of the time in the New Testament the tellers are people who have just seen or lived through something they cannot keep quiet about:
- the neighbors who watched a man set free from demons and told the crowd how it happened (Mark 5:16)
- a healed man sent home to relate everything God had done for him (Luke 8:39)
- the apostles coming back from their mission and reporting to Jesus all they had done (Luke 9:10)
- Barnabas laying out for the wary apostles how Saul had met the Lord on the road (Acts 9:27)
- Peter, just out of prison, going over how the Lord had brought him out (Acts 12:17)
In none of these is a bare announcement enough. What is asked for, or given, is the story itself, told through.
Twice the word turns the other way, toward a telling too big to finish. The line from Isaiah quoted in Acts 8:33 asks who could ever recount the sufferer's generation, and the writer of Hebrews breaks off his roll call of the faithful because the clock would run out on him if he kept going (Hebrews 11:32). The verb means the same thing in both places. What has changed is that the full going-through is out of reach.
It sits between two neighbors. The ordinary word for bringing back word (ἀπαγγέλλω) says only that a message was delivered, while this word says the whole story was told; Mark 5:14 and 5:16 use them in that order, one scene apart. The noun from the same root (διήγησις), which Luke uses of his own Gospel, names the finished narrative that such telling produces.