suzēteō

BDAG divides the ten New Testament occurrences between "to seek or examine together, discuss" and "to contend with persistence, dispute, debate, argue," and LSJ documents the same double range in earlier Greek, where this compound of ζητέω covers joint inquiry and philosophical disputation alike. Louw and Nida likewise assign its uses to more than one domain of speech, separating discussion from dispute. The distribution is striking: six of the ten uses are in Mark, with two in Luke and two in Acts, and there are none in Paul, John, or the catholic epistles. In Mark the verb serves both the crowd's and the disciples' incomprehension (1:27; 9:10) and the scribal or Pharisaic challenge (8:11; 9:14, 16; 12:28), so the sense is fixed by who the participants are rather than by the verb itself, and the major Markan commentaries treat both uses as ordinary for the word. In Acts it twice names Hellenistic Jewish synagogue disputation (6:9; 9:29), the same setting on both sides of Saul's conversion, and in both cases it issues in an attempt on the speaker's life. Two verses carry genuine classification questions. At Mark 9:16 the reading printed here, πρὸς αὐτούς, has the crowd arguing with the scribes, whereas the variant πρὸς ἑαυτούς would have them questioning among themselves. At Mark 12:28 the referent of αὐτῶν decides whether the debate the scribe overhears is Jesus with the Sadducees of 12:18-27 or the scribes among themselves. The cognate noun συζήτησις (G4803) occurs only at Acts 28:29, a verse absent from the earliest manuscripts.