הָפַכ לֶגּוֹמֵן

Summary

Hapax legomenon ("said only once") is the technical term for a word appearing only once in a given corpus. It is critical for the authenteō debate: Paul had over 100 uses of exousia available for "authority," yet deliberately chose the extraordinarily rare authenteō — a lexical signal that he is not talking about ordinary church leadership authority but something far more specific and semantically loaded.

It is not a biblical word itself but a technical term used extensively in NT exegesis. In the WIM context, hapax legomenon is invoked critically in discussions of authenteō (1 Tim 2:12), which is a NT hapax — appearing nowhere else in the NT. Article 340 emphasizes that hapax status goes far beyond the NT: the verb authenteō is extraordinarily rare across all extant Greek literature before and around Paul's time, with only around eight possible examples in secular sources from the first century BC to 312 AD. This rarity is crucial for the egalitarian argument: Paul had over 100 uses of exousia (authority) available to him; his deliberate choice of the rare, semantically-ambiguous authenteō instead of exousia, proistēmi, or any other standard word for authority is a lexical signal that he is not talking about ordinary church leadership authority. Chrysostom's use of "authentysen hapax kakōs" (exercised authority wrongly, once) demonstrates that the word's force was understood contextually, requiring the modifier kakōs to make it clearly negative. The term also appears in discussions of teknogonia (1 Tim 2:15), which is also a NT hapax.