to marvel: to be brought up short by something extraordinary, from awed amazement to bewildered surprise.
This is the New Testament's ordinary word for the moment something stops you in your tracks. On its own it does not say whether that reaction is glad, fearful, or hostile. It simply names being halted by something you cannot yet take in, and the setting supplies the color.
- Crowds are stunned by a healing, an exorcism, or an answer no one can match.
- Pilate is puzzled that a prisoner will not defend himself.
- A person is told to stop being surprised.
All of this is the same verb.
Because the word carries no built-in verdict, a reader has to watch who is wondering and at what before deciding what the wonder amounts to. In the Old Testament Greek this became the fitting response to God's mighty acts, so wonder often opens toward praise. But it can just as easily curdle into perplexity or refusal.
That ambivalence is the heart of the word in the Gospels. Amazement at Jesus runs all through them, yet the writers treat it as a reaction that has not yet decided what it is. The people who marvel are not the same as the people who believe. Wonder can be the doorway to faith, or a crowd's passing reflex, or even, when it hardens, a refusal to see. In a striking reversal it can also run the other way: Jesus himself marvels, once at a Gentile soldier's faith and once at his hometown's unbelief.
The word also has a receiving side. A person or thing can be the one marveled at, held in wonder and honor by others. At its height that admiration becomes worship, whether the honor given to Christ when he returns or the awestruck allegiance the world gives to a counterfeit power.
Nuances
Whether Paul's opening θαυμάζω ὅτι expresses genuine astonishment or deploys a conventional, possibly ironic, epistolary rebuke formula in which surprise is a form rather than a felt emotion.
- majorityReal astonishment. The Koine letter convention may supply the shape, but Paul is genuinely surprised and chagrined at the Galatians' desertion; the current mainstream, including Hansen's mediating label astonishment-rebuke and Pawlak's argument that a fixed ironic-letter genre cannot be securely established.; J. D. G. Dunn, The Epistle to the Galatians (BNTC, 1993), 39; D. J. Moo, Galatians (BECNT, 2013), 74-75; M. Pawlak, "Is Galatians an Ironic Letter? Θαυμάζω, Ancient Letter Writing Handbooks, and Gal 1:6," Novum Testamentum 63.2 (2021): 249-70
- minorityA formulaic, ironic rebuke opening the letter's reproach section, where the astonishment is conventional or feigned rather than heartfelt.; H. D. Betz, Galatians (Hermeneia, 1979), 46-47; M. D. Nanos, The Irony of Galatians (Fortress, 2002)
Whether John's marveling at the vision of the harlot is the standard perplexed astonishment of an apocalyptic seer or a culpable attraction to the woman's outward splendor.
- majorityThe genre-standard perplexity of the visionary before a paradox (a woman robed as a queen yet drunk on the blood of the saints), which conventionally prompts the angel's explanation, so the angel's question is didactic rather than corrective.; D. E. Aune, Revelation (Word Biblical Commentary 52A-C, 1997-98); C. R. Koester, Revelation (Anchor Yale Bible 38A, 2014); R. Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy (T&T Clark, 1993)
- minorityA momentary lapse into admiration of the harlot's beauty, which the angel's question mildly rebukes, echoing the angel's later corrections of John's misdirected worship.; G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation (NIGTC, 1999), ad Rev 17:6