I was chasing up references to authentes and was linked here to a post on Alexander Rhetor. Having read through the post and very insightful and helpful comments, I decided to join up.
I have been conducting my own research into the authent- family through a new approach which separates the adjective, authentikos, derived from auto and hentes, away from an entirely different semantic family derived from auto and entea. This gives rise to the verb, authenteo and the two nouns authentia and authentes, all with a stem meaning “slay”. I omit “with his own hand”, observing that it was an insertion solely for poetic irony by the Douay-Rheims Bible, into the text of Wisdom of Solomon 12:6. It was Thayer’s inclusion of the phrase in his definition, and subsequently copied by other notable lexica, which has greatly added to the confusion in translating this family (these families?) of words.
I have made detailed analysis of several texts highlighting anomalies and offering a semantically, lexically, grammatically and contextually viable alternative from my new approach. I hope to offer some of these in subsequent posts for your expert appraisal.