What Does Acts 3:15 Mean?
And you killed the one who goes ahead into life, whom God raised from the dead. We are witnesses of this.
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 killed the Prince of life, whom God hath raised from the dead; whereof we are witnesses.THE KEY
The one humans kill is named as life’s pioneer, and God’s raising makes that apparent contradiction the heart of the witness.
THE MEANING
This verse holds two truths together: violence really kills, and God raises the one named as life’s leader. Death before your eyes is real, but it does not prove that life has lost its source or its future; the witnesses keep that reversal visible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
The lie that violence gets the final word on life.
THE ROOT
ἀρχηγόν
archēgon
GROWS FROM
ἀρχή + ἄγω (Greek compound)
Beginning or first place joined with leading or bringing; a founder, pioneer, or leader.
“the one who goes ahead into life” in this verse is archēgon. “Prince” carries more than rank: it names the one who goes first and leads. Calling him the Prince of life places life under its pioneer and leader, even as the verse says he is killed and raised.
ALSO GROWS
archē: Beginning, first place, or rule.
ἀρχή
The beginning element gives the title its sense of origination and precedence, reaching beyond a prince’s status toward life’s source.
agō: Lead or bring.
ἄγω
The leading element opens the title toward movement: the Prince leads through the death named here, and God raises him.
ζωή
zōē
GROWS FROM
ζω- (from ζάω, zaō)
Living; life as something lived and present.
“Life” is not only an abstract possession in this phrase: it is joined to a leader who is himself killed and raised. The verse holds life and death together without treating death as the final meaning of life.
ALSO GROWS
zaō: Live, be alive.
ζάω
The related verb brings “life” close to the state of being alive, the very reality death appears to interrupt.
zōopoieō: Make alive, give life.
ζωοποιέω
This related compound makes the verse’s movement visible: the God who raises the dead is the one who makes alive.
THE PATTERN
The death humans inflict does not hold final authority where God raises life.
For you do not leave my living soul to Sheol; you do not give your faithful one to see the pit.No one lifts it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. I have received this commandment from my Father.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
For it fit him, for whom all things are and through whom all things are, in leading many sons into being clothed in weight, to make complete, through sufferings, the captain of their deliverance.“Captain” translates the same Greek word, ἀρχηγός (archēgos), rendered “Prince” here. The title names the one who goes first and leads; Hebrews connects that passage through suffering with bringing many into glory.
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