krinō

At its root this word means to separate one thing from another, the way grain is sifted from chaff. From that simple picture the whole range grows: to sort out, then to weigh, then to decide what is right, and finally to declare a verdict and see it carried out. To judge, in this word, is to sift a person or a case and pronounce the outcome.

That single act covers a wide field, and the senses below differ mainly in who is doing the judging. When God or Christ is the judge, the word names the final reckoning the whole New Testament looks toward, and also God's present, fatherly correction of his own people. When it is one believer sizing up another, the same word becomes the warning of Jesus and Paul: do not set yourself up as judge over people who answer to God, not to you. In a courtroom it is the ordinary work of trying a case and handing down a ruling, and in a few places, borrowed from the Old Testament, it stretches to mean ruling or governing a people.

The verb often slides toward the negative result of a verdict. To judge someone, in many verses, is already to condemn them, because the verdict has gone against them. Greek lets one word carry both the neutral act of judging and its unfavorable outcome, which is why the same form can mean simply "judge" in one verse and "condemn" in the next. Just as important, and easy for English readers to miss, the Old Testament behind these writers used its word for judging to mean rescue as much as punishment: when God judges, he condemns the wrongdoer and in the same breath vindicates the wronged. That is why God's people can await his judgment as good news.

Here the word is not about weighing other people but about making up one's own mind. The decision is reached, then acted on. It is the word Paul uses when he says he resolved to do one thing and not another, and the word James uses when the Jerusalem council reaches its ruling on what to require of new believers. By the first century this was everyday language: business and government documents used it for a settled decision, the equivalent of "it has been decided."

This sense grows naturally out of judging: to judge a matter is to settle it, and once the matter is settled the word names the settled purpose itself. The focus is on the firmness of the decision, not on any verdict against a person. This use alone is enough to show that the word does not simply mean "condemn," since here no one is being condemned at all.

This is the quietest sense, closest to plain English "reckon" or "judge that." Someone looks at the facts and concludes that something is so: that a course is right, that a claim is true, that one person rightly answered a question. No court and no condemnation are in view, only the forming of a considered opinion.

A close cousin of this sense is to rate one thing above another: in Romans 14 one person regards every day alike while another esteems one day as special. The mind is weighing and preferring, not condemning. The sense shades close to deciding and assessing, since these are never far apart, but here the result is a judgment of the mind rather than a sentence on a person. Paul invites his readers into it when he says, in effect, weigh this for yourselves and see what you conclude.

When the word turns to the experience of standing before a court, it names being on trial or taking someone to court rather than handing down the verdict. This is usually how it reads when the person is on the receiving end of the process: Paul, again and again in Acts, says he is being tried, brought to trial, called to account.

It is the same legal world as judging, seen from the dock instead of the bench. The thing at issue is the proceeding itself, the lawsuit or the hearing, not the final ruling that closes it.