What Does Luke 20:27 Mean?
Then some of the Sadducees came to him, those who speak against any rising, and they asked him,
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 came to him certain of the Sadducees, which deny that there is any resurrection; and they asked him,THE KEY
Resurrection means a standing up, and the question begins by excluding that possibility.
THE MEANING
This verse puts a boundary before the question: resurrection is ruled out, then the question is asked. A question asked now also carries the limits of what its asker already considers possible.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A question is not automatically open simply because it is asked; it may already be built around what has been denied.
THE ROOT
ἀνάστασιν
anastasin
GROWS FROM
ἵστημι (histēmi), with ἀνά (ana-, up)
To stand or set upright; the compound carries the image of rising up.
The Greek word gives resurrection the shape of standing up, not just an abstract belief about what happens after death. Here that rising is the very possibility excluded before the question begins.
ALSO GROWS
anistēmi: To rise or stand up
ἀνίστημι
It makes the movement inside “resurrection” visible: a person rises.
anastasis: A rising, resurrection
ἀνάστασις
This is the noun the Sadducees deny, carrying the same image of standing up.
ἀντιλέγουσιν
antilegousin
GROWS FROM
λέγω (legō), with ἀντί (anti-, against)
To say or speak; with the prefix, to speak against or contradict.
The denial is voiced as opposition: they speak against the rising before they ask. The question therefore arrives inside a position already stated.
ALSO GROWS
legō: To say or speak
λέγω
It shows that this denial is expressed in words, not left as an unstated assumption.
antilogos: Contradiction, opposing speech
ἀντίλογος
It echoes the verse’s movement: speech is set against the possibility of rising.
THE PATTERN
A question can be narrowed by what is ruled out before it is asked.
Now the serpent was smoother than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, Did God really say, You shall not eat from every tree of the garden?That same day the Sadducees came to him, the ones who say there is no rising, and asked him,But if the Anointed One is heralded as awakened from the dead, how do some among you say that there is no rising of the dead?THE THREAD
That the Anointed One must suffer, and that he would be the first of the rising from the dead, and would announce light to the people and to the nations.The same Greek word-family appears in “resurrection,” now linked to one who rises from the dead. What sounds like an abstract claim in Luke 20:27 takes the concrete form of a rising whose effect is light reaching people.
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