chrēmatizō

In everyday Greek this verb belonged to public life. It meant "to handle public affairs," "to give an official answer," "to issue a ruling." Greek writers also used it of an oracle delivering its response, and that is the use the New Testament picks up: when this word appears, a message has come down from God, and the word carries that source on its own, so the writer never has to say who spoke.

The person on the receiving end is almost always the one the sentence is about. Noah is warned, Joseph is warned, Cornelius is told, Simeon has something disclosed to him, Moses is instructed. English has to turn the sentence around and add words the Greek does not need, which is why translations of these verses differ so much from one another.

What comes through the word varies, and the three shades below follow that:

• a warning or an order that calls for action, as when the visitors from the east are told not to go back to Herod
• a disclosure about what lies ahead, as when Simeon learns he will not die before he has seen the Messiah
• God himself as the one doing the speaking, which is how Hebrews 12:25 uses it

None of this describes a vision or an ecstatic experience. Prophesying (προφητεύω) is about carrying God's word out to other people, while this word is about the message arriving at the person it was meant for. Uncovering what was hidden (ἀποκαλύπτω) claims that a veil has been lifted, while this word claims only that God has spoken. The noun built on it (χρηματισμός) names the answer itself, the reply God gives.

The same verb had a second life. If public business gave a man a title, he was said to bear that title, and from there the word came to mean simply going by a name: being the person, or the group, that people call such and such. It is not the act of naming somebody. It is the state of carrying the name.

Both New Testament uses turn on a name that stuck in public. At Antioch the followers of Jesus first go by the name "Christians," a label that then travels across the Roman world. In Romans 7:3 Paul says a woman who marries another man while her husband is alive will go by the name "adulteress": his point is the standing that name gives her, not any words spoken over her.

That is what separates this word from the ordinary word for calling out to someone (καλέω), which looks at the act of addressing a person, and from the word for pronouncing a name over someone (ὀνομάζω). This word looks at the name a person is known by once the naming is over and done.