karpophoreō

BDAG divides the eight New Testament occurrences into a literal branch, of soil bearing a crop (Mark 4:28), and a figurative branch covering the rest. LSJ documents the verb in earlier Greek of plants and land bearing fruit, and Moulton and Milligan note its ordinary agricultural use in the documentary papyri, which is why the metaphor would have been immediately legible to a first-century reader. Hauck's TDNT article on καρπός places the New Testament usage within the wider biblical pattern in which a life is assessed by its yield, a pattern already visible in the Synoptic sower tradition and in the Baptist's demand for fruit worthy of repentance. The one grammatical question of substance is the middle participle καρποφορούμενον in Colossians 1:6. Lightfoot argued that the middle is intensive, presenting the gospel as fruitful by its own inherent energy, and many commentators have followed him; others hold that voice distinctions had weakened in Hellenistic Greek and that no such force should be pressed, and Dunn reads the clause primarily as a claim about the gospel's worldwide spread. On Romans 7:4 and 7:5 Cranfield observes that the two occurrences are deliberately parallel, the dative naming the one to whom the harvest accrues, τῷ θεῷ over against τῷ θανάτῳ. None of this touches the lexical sense of the verb, which is not in doubt. The exact wording of BDAG, Hauck, Lightfoot and Cranfield should be checked against the print editions.