epiphaneia

The lexica agree on the sense. BDAG treats the noun as a religious technical term for the appearance of a deity coming to help, and then lists the New Testament uses under Christ's appearing: the future appearing at 2 Thessalonians 2:8, 1 Timothy 6:14, 2 Timothy 4:1, 4:8, and Titus 2:13, and the first appearing at 2 Timothy 1:10. LSJ gives "appearing, manifestation," especially of deities, alongside secular uses for the dawn and for the sudden appearance of enemy forces. The TDNT article on the φαίνω group by Bultmann and Lührmann sets the word within a wider Greek religious vocabulary of divine self-showing and stresses that the New Testament restricts the noun to Christ. Distribution is significant: all six occurrences are Pauline, five of them in the Pastoral Letters, and the word is absent from the translated Hebrew canon while it appears repeatedly in 2 Maccabees for God's interventions on his people's behalf (for example 2 Maccabees 2:21). Lau's monograph on the epiphany Christology of the Pastorals is the standard treatment and argues that this Jewish Greek usage, not the imperial cult, is the primary channel, a reading Marshall and Towner follow; Dibelius and Conzelmann, following Deissmann's papyrological work, had argued instead for direct dependence on ruler-cult terminology, where a sovereign's ceremonial arrival was itself called an epiphany and Antiochus IV styled himself theos epiphanes, "god made manifest," using the cognate adjective. A separate and much-debated question at Titus 2:13 is whether "our great God and Savior Jesus Christ" names one person or two; Harris and Wallace argue for one, and one supporting argument turns on this noun, since elsewhere in the New Testament it is used only of the appearing of Christ. That debate concerns the referent of the verse, not the sense of this word.