nosos

The lexica are unanimous on the New Testament sense. BDAG gives νόσος as "disease, illness" with no subdivision; EDNT likewise treats all twelve occurrences under a single physical sense; Louw and Nida place them in domain 23 (Physiological Processes and States: Sickness, Disease, Weakness). LSJ documents a far wider classical range for the Ionic νοῦσος / Attic νόσος, extending to plague, mental derangement, and moral or civic corruption, and Beekes (Etymological Dictionary of Greek) records no accepted etymology; none of the non-physical classical extensions is attested for the noun in the New Testament, though the cognate verb νοσέω does carry a figurative sense at 1 Timothy 6:4 ("having a diseased craving for controversy"). The Septuagint uses νόσος chiefly for חֳלִי and מַחֲלָה. In Matthew the word belongs to a stereotyped summary formula, πᾶσαν νόσον καὶ πᾶσαν μαλακίαν (4:23; 9:35; 10:1), which Davies and Allison and Luz analyse as an editorial bracket framing the healing narratives; the two nouns are treated as a comprehensive doublet rather than as a precise medical taxonomy, with νόσος the graver term. Luke's preference for νόσος together with related vocabulary was once taken as evidence of a physician author (W. K. Hobart, The Medical Language of St. Luke, 1882), a thesis dismantled by Henry J. Cadbury (The Style and Literary Method of Luke, 1920), who showed the vocabulary to be common literary Koine; the point is now standard in the commentaries (Fitzmyer, Luke I-IX, Anchor Bible). The consistent separation of νόσος from demonic affliction in the healing summaries (Matthew 4:24; Mark 1:34; Luke 6:18; 9:1; Acts 19:12) is discussed by John Christopher Thomas (The Devil, Disease and Deliverance, 1998) as evidence that the New Testament writers did not collapse illness into possession, and by Howard Clark Kee (Medicine, Miracle and Magic in New Testament Times, 1986) in relation to Greco-Roman healing categories. The most debated occurrence is Matthew 8:17, where Matthew renders Isaiah 53:4 independently of the Septuagint (τὰς ἀσθενείας ἡμῶν ἔλαβεν καὶ τὰς νόσους ἐβάστασεν, against the Septuagint's sin-oriented paraphrase). The exegetical dispute there concerns the force of the citation, whether Matthew presents the healings as vicarious bearing or as removal of affliction, and its christological weight (Gundry, Davies and Allison, Luz, Hagner, France); it does not touch the lexical sense of νόσος, which all parties take as bodily disease.