metanoeō

The standard lexica and theological dictionaries agree that the New Testament use of this verb is far richer than its bare roots ("after" plus "think") suggest, and resists the gloss "change of mind." Louw and Nida define it as changing one's whole way of life from a complete change of thought and attitude toward sin and righteousness, and note that the English focus on sorrow or contrition is not the emphasis of the Greek. NIDNTT (Goetzmann) and EDNT (Merklein) likewise judge that the merely intellectual sense plays very little part in the New Testament; the stress falls on the decision of the whole person to turn around. A long-running debate, sharpened by Johannes Behm's influential TDNT article, asked whether the word's full "turning" sense was carried over from the Hebrew prophetic call to return (shuv). Effie Freeman Thompson and later Robert Wilkin pressed the philological fact that the Greek Old Testament almost never used this verb to translate shuv, reaching instead for epistrepho, and used this verb mostly to render nacham, usually with God as subject. Guy Nave's monograph on Luke-Acts argues that the Lukan sense is a comprehensive change in thinking that is cognitive, ethical, and behavioral at once, and is God's gift more than a human achievement, not chiefly remorse. The translation history is itself part of the meaning: Jerome's Latin "do penance" drifted toward a church ritual, Erasmus proposed "recover your senses," and Luther's first thesis insisted the whole life of believers is meant. Most recently David Lambert has argued that "repentance" as an interior moral act is largely a later Hellenistic construct read back onto the Hebrew Bible, a thesis welcomed by some and contested by Mark Boda and others who defend a stable biblical theology of turning.