hupomenō

The word is built from two smaller words meaning "under" and "remain," so at its most concrete it simply means to stay put while others move on. In the boyhood story of Jesus, the boy stays behind in Jerusalem after his parents have set out for home (ὑπέμεινεν in Luke 2:43), and in Acts, Silas and Timothy stay behind in Beroea while Paul travels ahead (Acts 17:14).

This plain sense of holding your place is the root underneath the word's more famous use. To endure, in the next meaning, is really just to hold your place under pressure rather than under travel.

This is the sense that made the word one of the most important in the early church's vocabulary for the Christian life. It is not passive patience or quiet resignation. The picture behind it is a soldier who refuses to run, holding his position while the attack comes on. Applied to faith, it means standing firm under trial and pressure and not letting go.

The New Testament writers fill this word with hope. Endurance is the way Christian life is lived while waiting for the end, and Jesus himself is the pattern: he "endured the cross" (Hebrews 12:2). The disciple "who endures to the end will be saved" (Matthew 24:13), and even love, at the height of Paul's description of it, "endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:7). Suffering that a believer holds up under produces this quality, so it becomes both the proof and the shape of a tested faith.

The older rendering "patience," familiar from the King James Bible, has led many readers to hear something mild and meek where the Greek is active and strong. A different Greek word, μακροθυμέω, covers patience toward provoking people; this word is about holding firm under hostile circumstances and events.