What Does John 2:20 Mean?
Then the Jews said, This temple was forty-six years in the building, and will you raise it up in three days?
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
Then said the Jews, Forty and six years was this temple in building, and wilt thou rear it up in three days?THE KEY
The word translated “rear it up” also means “wake,” so the question about a building carries the verb of resurrection.
THE MEANING
The visible temple invites a calculation in decades, but that measure cannot hold the living temple standing before you. Raising it in three days is on another scale: the verb can speak of awakening, and the next verse identifies the temple with a body.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
This undoes the assumption that God’s dwelling is only a human-built structure, and that whatever is raised must follow the structure’s timetable.
THE ROOT
ἐγείρεις
egeireis
GROWS FROM
ἐγερ- / ἐγειρ-
The Greek verb stem means to awaken, rouse, or raise up.
“raise it up” in this verse is egeireis. In English, this sounds like lifting a structure; the Greek verb also means waking someone and is used for being raised from death. The question carries a second scale inside it: the temple’s three-day raising can be heard as awakening to life, which the next verse makes explicit as a body.
ALSO GROWS
egeirousin: They wake or awaken.
ἐγείρουσιν
In Mark 4:38 this form describes the disciples waking Jesus, showing that the verb reaches from raising something to waking someone.
ēgerthē: He was raised; he is risen.
ἠγέρθη
In Matthew 28:6 this form describes Jesus’ resurrection, bringing the same root’s meaning of raising into clear view.
THE PATTERN
God’s dwelling is not confined to a constructed sanctuary; scripture locates it among people, in the human body, and in God and the Lamb themselves.
And let them make me a set-apart place, that I may pitch my tent among them.Or have you not seen that your body is a temple of the Set-Apart Breath within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own?And I perceive no temple in it, for the Lord God, the one who holds all, and the Lamb are its temple.THE THREAD
Jesus answered and said to them, Unbind this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.The same Greek verb, ἐγείρω (egeirō), “to awaken or raise up,” appears in both verses. John 2:21 identifies the temple as his body, so the three days point to resurrection rather than rebuilding.
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