a relative: someone who belongs to your family line, whether a member of your wider family or a fellow member of your people
The word points to people who share a family line. In the Gospels and Acts it almost always means the wider circle of kin, the people you count as family but who do not live under your roof, and the writers keep placing it in lists that mark exactly that spot in a person's world.
- Mark 6:4 sets it between a prophet's hometown and his own household.
- Luke 14:12 runs through friends, then brothers, then relatives, then wealthy neighbors.
- Luke 21:16 warns of betrayal by parents, brothers, relatives, and friends.
- Acts 10:24 has Cornelius gathering his relatives along with his closest friends.
Paul stretches the same word much further. Writing about Israel he calls the Jewish people "my brothers, my relatives by natural descent" (Romans 9:3), where the one word reaches across a whole nation. Greek could do that because the idea underneath is shared ancestry, and a people is a family grown large. When the New Testament wants a word for a member of your own local people or tribe, it reaches instead for συμφυλέτης.
That double reach is what makes the closing greetings of Romans hard to read. When Paul calls Andronicus, Junia, Herodion, Lucius, Jason, and Sosipater his relatives, he may be naming members of his own family, though most readers take him to mean fellow Jews, since that is how he had used the word a few chapters earlier. Notice as well what the word never does: it names a person, not the family itself. For the family or clan taken as a whole, the New Testament uses the matching noun συγγένεια.