What Does 1 Corinthians 15:16 Mean?
For if the dead are not awakened, then not even the Anointed One has been awakened.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:THE KEY
Christ’s rising and the dead’s rising are one shared claim: the sentence gives them the same verb.
THE MEANING
Your hope for the dead and Christ’s raising stand in one claim. If the dead do not rise, Christ is not raised either; the verse leaves no room for a resurrection that belongs to him alone.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
You can hold Christ’s resurrection as true while treating the dead’s rising as impossible or irrelevant.
THE ROOT
ἐγείρονται
egeirontai
GROWS FROM
ἐγείρω
egeirō
To wake, awaken, or raise up.
“are awakened” in this verse is egeirontai. The sentence uses forms of this one verb for both the dead and Christ: they are not assigned separate kinds of rising. What is denied of the dead is also denied of Christ.
ALSO GROWS
egēgertai: Has been raised.
ἐγήγερται
This form describes Christ’s raising in the second half of the verse, joining it to the dead’s rising in the first.
egersis: Rising, awakening, resurrection.
ἔγερσις
This related noun names the rising as an event, showing that the verse’s shared verb belongs to a wider language of awakening.
THE PATTERN
The raising of Christ and the rising of the dead belong to one shared movement of life.
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground shall awake, some to the life of the ages, and some to exposure and contempt for the ages.But if the breath of him who raised Jesus from the dead makes its home in you, then he who raised the Anointed One from the dead will also make your death-bound bodies alive through his breath that makes its home in you.For if we trust that Jesus died and rose, so also God will lead those who have slept through Jesus along with him.THE THREAD
But now the Anointed One has been awakened from the dead, and has become the first portion of those who have lain down to sleep.The same raising verb moves from the condition in this verse to the declaration that Christ is risen. Calling him the firstfruits connects his rising to those who sleep: his is the beginning of the harvest.
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