speed: taking very little time, whether the action itself is quick or the wait before it is short
This is a noun for speed itself, the quality of getting somewhere or getting something done in almost no time. Greek writers rarely used it on its own; they parked it in fixed phrases with a preposition, and one of those phrases is the only place it appears in the New Testament. Every one of its nine occurrences is the phrase that reads literally "in speed" and works the way English works with "in haste" or "in a hurry".
The phrase pulls in two directions that English keeps in separate words:
- how fast the action itself is done, as when the angel tells the sleeping Peter to get up at once and the chains drop off his wrists (Acts 12:7)
- how little time passes before something happens, as when Festus says he is leaving for Caesarea before long (Acts 25:4)
Greek never had to choose between the two. The noun simply names speed, and the setting decides whether that speed belongs to the person acting or to the clock.
The stakes are highest in Revelation, whose opening and closing lines both say that what God showed John must happen "in speed" (Revelation 1:1; Revelation 22:6). If the phrase is dating the events, the book promises that they are near. If it is describing their pace, it promises that once they begin they will run their course fast. Most scholars and most translators take the first reading, but the phrase by itself does not settle it, and the same argument runs through the related adverb (ταχύ) in the repeated promise "I am coming quickly".
Nuances
Disputed
How the phrase in Revelation 1:1 and 22:6 measures the events it introduces: their nearness in time, or the speed with which they unfold.
- majorityThe phrase is temporal. The events are near, and it means "soon, in a short time".; BDAG, s.v. τάχος; David E. Aune, Revelation 1-5, Word Biblical Commentary 52A (Nashville: Nelson, 1997); Robert H. Mounce, The Book of Revelation, rev. ed., New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998)
- minorityWhat is imminent is the beginning of a fulfillment already under way in Christ, echoing the Greek wording of Daniel 2:28 and 2:29 while replacing its "in the latter days" with this phrase, rather than a prediction that the whole sequence falls inside a short span.; G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999)