doxa

In ordinary Greek this word meant an opinion, or what people thought of you, and from there a person's reputation. The Greek Old Testament redirected it: translators reached for it to carry the Hebrew word for God's weight or substance made visible (כבוד), the cloud on Sinai and the brightness that filled the tabernacle and temple. The New Testament inherits that loaded sense. The everyday meaning of repute survives, but it now orbits a far heavier center, and the classical sense of opinion has all but dropped away.

The thread holding the senses together is that what is genuinely weighty shines, and what shines rightly draws honor. So the same word reaches from the brightness that breaks out when God shows himself, to the praise that brightness deserves, to the plain esteem people give or chase, to the differing shine of sun, moon, and stars. The senses below pull these apart only because a verse usually leans on one. Often two are meant at once: when humans are said to fall short of God's glory, the honor they failed to give and the radiance they were made to bear are both in view.

A further strand is future and shared: the splendor God promises his people, the state of being raised and changed into brightness, and the glory Christ appears in when he comes. This is still the same word, God's own weighty life now extended to those joined to him, not a different idea. In John's Gospel the same word even names the cross, where Jesus is lifted up: the lowest dishonor turns out to be where God's true weight is seen.

Because English has no single word that holds radiant presence, public honor, and inner dignity at once, translators rotate among glory, honor, splendor, and praise, and the unity of the Greek word can get lost behind them.

In a couple of places the plural of this word names not a quality but persons, the exalted heavenly beings that arrogant people are charged with insulting. The sense still grows out of the idea of weight and dignity, but here it has hardened into a title for the beings who possess that dignity, the way English might speak of dignitaries or authorities.

This use is rare and specialized, and exactly which beings are meant, and whether they are good or evil, is itself debated. The clue is that the plural form stands for someone, a class of persons, rather than for a quality.