katēgoreō

There is near-total scholarly agreement that κατηγορέω is a technical forensic verb, to bring formal charges in court, whose courtroom sense stayed remarkably stable from Herodotus and the Attic orators through the Koine papyri and into the New Testament (Büchsel, TDNT 3:636-639). The lexica derive it from κατά plus ἀγορεύω, to speak against someone in the public assembly and its courts. LSJ organizes the range into a dominant forensic core, a derived non-judicial sense (to indicate or betray), and the Aristotelian logical sense (to predicate), but only the forensic core appears in the New Testament. BDAG (533) calls it nearly always a legal terminus technicus; Louw-Nida (33.427) glosses it more loosely as bringing serious charges with a possible legal connotation, a difference that matters for the metaphorical uses. Its invariant antonym is ἀπολογέομαι, to make a defense. The Septuagint uses it rarely but pointedly, always of righteous Jews denounced before a foreign or apostate ruler (Daniel 3:8; 6:5; 1 Maccabees 7:6, 25), the template Luke draws on for Jesus and Paul on trial. Sherwin-White and Fitzmyer read Luke-Acts as deploying the verb for Roman accusatio under cognitio procedure, clustered with cognates such as ἀπολογία and ἔγκλημα (see Acts 25:16). Andrew Lincoln's Truth on Trial treats John's Gospel as a cosmic lawsuit in which Moses, or the Torah he wrote, prosecutes Jesus's opponents (John 5:45). At Romans 2:15 the verb is transposed into the inner tribunal of conscience anticipating God's judgment. Revelation 12:10 pairs the verb with the unusual agent-noun κατήγωρ (Codex Alexandrinus, against the Byzantine κατήγορος), which most scholars (Charles, Aune, Beale, EDNT) explain as a re-Hellenized form of the rabbinic loanword qaṭigor for the accusing angel, though Radermacher and others defend it as a native Greek formation.