What Does Mark 12:18 Mean?
Then the Sadducees came to him, who say there is no rising from the dead, and they asked him, saying,
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 come unto him the Sadducees, which say there is no resurrection; and they asked him, saying,THE KEY
“Resurrection” carries the concrete image of standing up again, hidden inside an English word that can sound like an abstract doctrine.
THE MEANING
You can hold a conclusion about what cannot happen and still bring its question to Jesus. The Greek word for resurrection carries the image of standing up again; here, that possibility sits beside a firm denial of it.
THE ROOT
ἀνάστασιν
anastasin
GROWS FROM
στα-/στη- (sta-/ste-, the standing stem)
To stand or be set upright.
The word combines ἀνά (ana, up or again) with the standing stem of ἵστημι (histēmi, stand): resurrection is a standing up again. English can make it sound like an abstract belief, while the Greek keeps the image of rising on your feet.
ALSO GROWS
histēmi: Stand; set upright.
ἵστημι
This verb is the standing at the heart of resurrection’s image.
anistēmi: Rise or stand up; raise.
ἀνίστημι
This related verb gives the noun its motion: what is down rises to stand again.
stasis: Standing; position.
στάσις
This related noun preserves the root’s sense of taking a standing position.
THE PATTERN
Scripture pictures resurrection as the dead waking and rising again.
Your dead will live; together with my corpse they will rise. Awake and ring out, you who camp in the dust, for your dew is a dew of lights, and the earth will drop the slackened ones.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.In an instant, in the flick of an eye, at the last trumpet; for it will sound, and the dead will be awakened undecaying, and we will be made other.THE THREAD
Jesus said to her, I am the rising, and the life. Whoever leans their weight into me, even if they die, will live.The same Greek word, ἀνάστασις (anastasis, resurrection), appears here. In Mark it names the possibility being denied; here Jesus uses that same word to name himself.
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