What Does 1 Corinthians 15:4 Mean?
And that he was buried, and that he has been awakened on the third day according to the writings.
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
And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:THE KEY
The Greek says he “has been raised”, a raising whose result stands, so the grave is real, but it is not the buried one’s final state.
THE MEANING
The burial remains real, and the raising is its answer: the one laid in a grave is the one now alive. This speaks to the reader’s present hope by placing mortal life inside a story where death is not the final state.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It undoes the belief that death makes a person irretrievable: the one raised is the one who was buried.
THE ROOT
ἐγήγερται
egēgertai
GROWS FROM
ἐγείρω
egeirō
To awaken, rouse, or raise up.
“has been awakened” in this verse is egēgertai. Here the verb means “has been raised”: its perfect form presents the raising as completed, with its result still standing. The same word can describe waking or being roused, joining resurrection to awakening without making the burial a metaphor.
ALSO GROWS
egersis: The act or event of rising.
ἔγερσις
This related noun names resurrection with the same raising word-family, revealing the shared root beneath “rose again” and “resurrection.”
egeire: A command to awaken or rise.
ἔγειρε
In Mark 5:41 this form is spoken to a dead girl; the same verb family describes rising from death and waking from sleep.
ἐτάφη
etaphē
GROWS FROM
θάπτω
thaptō
To bury, to lay the dead in a grave.
“was buried” in this verse is etaphē. This is the verse’s physical counterweight to “rose again”: it names burial plainly. Beside egeirō, the sentence says the one raised is the one who entered the grave.
ALSO GROWS
taphos: A burial place.
τάφος
The related word for the grave makes the burial concrete: the verse’s raising answers a body’s actual resting place.
entaphiazō: To prepare a body for burial.
ἐνταφιάζω
This related burial word extends the same word-family to the handling of the body, keeping the verse’s claim grounded in bodily death.
THE PATTERN
Scripture names death plainly while showing life raised through it.
For you do not leave my living soul to Sheol; you do not give your faithful one to see the pit.And he grasped the child by the hand and said to her, "Talitha cumi, little girl, I say to you, arise."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.THE THREAD
And God raised the Lord, and will raise us through his strength.The same raising verb is used for the Lord and for “us,” carrying the resurrection claim from Jesus into the reader’s own future. The grave remains real; the shared verb makes raising its answer.
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