poreuō

The word's basic force is straightforward physical movement: a person sets out, makes a journey, or goes to a destination. It covers the full range of travel, from a short errand (going to a neighbor's house at midnight) to a long journey across provinces. Because it is the ordinary Greek verb for going, it appears throughout the Gospels and Acts as a simple narrative word, and one common form of it often functions as a near-equivalent of "then", "having gone, he did X."

The word also carries, in a cluster of Johannine sayings, a distinctly solemn sense: Jesus announces that he is going away, to the Father, to prepare a place, to send the Paraclete. This departure language is not a different word, but the same verb of movement turned toward a unique destination. John uses it repeatedly to draw a contrast between Jesus coming from the Father and returning to him, and between his presence with the disciples and his absence that would be overcome by the Spirit. Acts 1:25 picks up the same idiom when it says Judas went to his own place.

In a pattern shared with the Hebrew הָלַךְ (to walk/go), Greek can use a verb of movement to describe the direction of a life. When this word is paired with a phrase describing a manner or path, "in their own desires," "in the way of Cain," "in all the commandments": it shifts from physical travel to moral conduct. The person's life is moving in a direction, following a course.

This sense is concentrated in the Epistles, where it describes both faithful living (Luke 1:6; Acts 9:31) and the corrupt path of false teachers and the ungodly (Jude 1:11, 16, 18; 2 Peter 2:10; 3:3). Luke 8:14 uses it of those whose spiritual life is choked by anxieties. The word carries no inherent moral valence in this sense, the direction of the conduct is always supplied by the accompanying phrase.