to run: to move at speed on foot, and by extension to pour full effort into a course already marked out, all the way to its finish
The plain sense is the one everyone knows. Someone covers ground fast on foot, usually because something urgent is happening. A bystander at the cross hurries off for a sponge, women leave the empty tomb at a run, a father closes the distance to his ragged son, two disciples race each other to the burial place. Even the roar of cavalry in Revelation is this verb: horses at a charge.
Everything else grows out of that picture without leaving it behind. Long before the New Testament, Greek writers had turned running into a compact way of talking about disciplined effort aimed at a goal, and the footraces of the Greek games furnished the image: a marked track, one finish line, a crown at the end. Paul reaches for it constantly. He calls his own work a course he is running and dreads having "run in vain"; he tells the Corinthians to run the way real competitors run; he asks the Galatians who cut in on them when they were "running well." The picture is never vague, because it always assumes three things:
- a course laid out by someone other than the runner
- effort spent along the whole of it rather than in bursts
- an outcome that can still be lost before the end
One use stretches the image furthest. Paul asks that the message itself may run, that it may travel fast and meet no barricade. Here the runner is not a person at all, and that is what holds the whole range together: not bare speed, but speed along a track toward something waiting at the far end. That is also what sets this word apart from simply hurrying (σπεύδω), from chasing after a target (διώκω), and from the steady day-to-day walking (περιπατέω) the New Testament uses for ordinary conduct.
Nuances
Whether "not of the one who runs" in Romans 9:16 excludes human effort from God's electing mercy or relativizes it.
- contestedWilling and running together name the whole range of human intention and action, which Paul relativizes rather than eliminates: election is not settled by human striving, yet that does not reduce a person to passivity.; C. E. B. Cranfield, The Epistle to the Romans, ICC (T&T Clark, 1979), on 9:16; James D. G. Dunn, Romans 9-16, WBC 38B (Word, 1988), on 9:16
- contestedGod's election does not in any sense ultimately depend on human volition or exertion, so Paul is excluding the runner's effort rather than merely putting it in its place.; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT (Eerdmans, 1996), on 9:16
Whether the phrase in Hebrews 12:1 pictures running a long-distance race or, using a known Greek idiom, undergoing a struggle in the face of death.
- majorityAn athletic race image: the readers are runners on a marked course who must endure to the finish, which is how the verb and the surrounding talk of laying aside weights and fixing the eyes on the goal are best read.; Harold W. Attridge, The Epistle to the Hebrews, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1989), on 12:1; William L. Lane, Hebrews 9-13, WBC 47B (Word, 1991), on 12:1; N. Clayton Croy, Endurance in Suffering, SNTSMS 98 (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Craig R. Koester, Hebrews, Anchor Bible 36 (Doubleday, 2001), on 12:1
- minorityNot an athletic image at all: outside a clearly athletic setting the Greek phrase for running a contest ordinarily means undergoing a struggle, especially a mortal one, and Hebrews 11 parades sufferers rather than athletes, so "let us undergo the struggle" is the better rendering.; Zoe Hollinger, "Rethinking the Translation of τρέχωμεν τὸν ... ἀγῶνα in Hebrews 12.1," The Bible Translator 70/1 (2019); Colin Sims, Irish Biblical Studies 27 (2008)