wickedness: badness as a settled quality in a person, with an edge of active ill will that means somebody harm
This is the noun that belongs to the New Testament's ordinary adjective for evil (πονηρός). The adjective calls a person, a deed, or a thing wicked; the noun names the wickedness itself, the quality rather than the thing that carries it. English Bibles usually print "wickedness" or "malice", and both are reaching for the same idea: badness that belongs to a person and that costs somebody else something.
The seven places it occurs fall into three groups. Once it is the bad intent behind an action, the scheming a person assumes nobody can see, as when Jesus answers a trap dressed up as a flattering question by naming the malice in it (Matthew 22:18). More often it is the whole corrupt condition: what fills a person on the inside while the outside stays clean and respectable (Luke 11:39), or one named fault in a catalogue of many (Romans 1:29). And where the word is plural, the quality has become a set of countable wrongs that people are told to turn away from (Mark 7:22; Acts 3:26).
One verse reaches further than personal character. In Ephesians 6:12 the struggle is not against flesh and blood but against powers whose whole character is this wickedness, so the word describes an evil larger than any one person's temper. Elsewhere it keeps close company with words for greed, for trickery (δόλος), and for dealing unfairly with people (ἀδικία).
It also travels with a near twin, another Greek word for badness in a person (κακία), and the two are hard to pull apart. Where a line can be drawn, this word leans toward evil that is up to something, while its partner leans toward the sour ill will a person carries around. In Romans 1:29 and 1 Corinthians 5:8 they stand side by side, and a translator has to find a different English word for each with little help from the sentence.
Nuances
Whether this word and the word for badness beside it in 1 Corinthians 5:8 form one sweeping phrase for the whole old moral state, or each keeps a distinguishable force.
- majorityThe two words form a pair used for effect, naming comprehensive moral corruption: the old leaven is the entire pre-Christian moral state, not two separately identified vices.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NICNT, rev. ed. (2014); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, NIGTC (2000), 402-405; Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians, Hermeneia (ET 1975)
- minorityEach word keeps a distinguishable sense even here, with the sweeping force coming from the context rather than from a merged phrase.; Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, Pillar (2010); Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians, Interpretation (1997)