an open declaration of where a person stands: the act of publicly professing loyalty and belief, and also the profession itself, the thing professed
The word is built from two ordinary Greek pieces meaning "same" and "say," so at root it is saying the same thing as someone else: agreeing out loud, in the open, where others can hear. Before the New Testament it was largely public and legal language. It named an agreement, an assent, the terms of a treaty, and the vow a person took on in front of witnesses. That public setting never leaves the word.
In the New Testament all six uses stand in a moment where somebody speaks up in front of others and can be held to it:
- Timothy made his good confession in front of many witnesses (1 Timothy 6:12).
- Jesus made his before Pontius Pilate, at the cost of his life (1 Timothy 6:13).
- The generosity of the Corinthians showed that their profession of the gospel was real, not just words (2 Corinthians 9:13).
Hebrews then turns the word toward what is professed. Believers are told to hold on to their confession and not let go (Hebrews 4:14; 10:23), and Jesus is called the apostle and high priest of the confession they share (Hebrews 3:1). The confession has become something a whole congregation owns together, a settled statement of loyalty that can be gripped in a crisis. The two directions are one idea seen from either end: the declaring, and the thing declared.
This is not the same as bearing witness. Testimony (μαρτυρία) reports what someone has seen or knows, and its weight rests on the reliability of the witness. A confession states whose side the speaker is on, and its weight rests on what the speaker is willing to lose by saying it.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the noun in Hebrews 3:1; 4:14; 10:23 (and "the good confession" of 1 Timothy 6:12, 13) designates a fixed confessional formula recited by the early churches, plausibly at baptism, or simply the act and content of Christian profession with no recoverable set text.
- majorityThe word names the Christian profession itself, act and content together; the language of holding it fast implies a settled and shared confession, but the evidence does not establish a fixed liturgical formula behind it.; BDAG (3rd ed., 2000), s.v. ὁμολογία; Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1989); Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews (NIGTC; Eerdmans, 1993)
- minorityIn Hebrews the noun is a technical term for a formulated confession the community recited, most likely in a baptismal setting, which explains the exhortations to hold it and not abandon it.; Otto Michel, "ὁμολογέω κτλ.," TDNT 5:199-220; Ernst Käsemann, The Wandering People of God: An Investigation of the Letter to the Hebrews (Augsburg, 1984); Günther Bornkamm, "Das Bekenntnis im Hebräerbrief," in Studien zu Antike und Urchristentum (Kaiser, 1959)