ris3n's Apologetics Codex

Lexicon

G1453 - egeiro

Strong's: G1453 · BLB lookup Pronunciation: eg-i'-ro Part of speech: verb (active / middle / passive) NT occurrences: ~144, heavily concentrated in resurrection narratives and Pauline soteriology Hebrew equivalents (LXX): קוּם (qum, to arise / stand up); עוּר (ʿur, to wake up / rouse)

Semantic range (Thayer / BDAG)

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  1. To wake up, rouse from sleep, the literal physical sense (Mark 4:38; Matthew 8:25; Acts 12:7).
  2. To rise, stand up (intransitive sense, often middle / passive), getting up from a seated or recumbent position (Matthew 9:5-7; Mark 2:9-12, the paralytic).
  3. To raise from the dead, the technical resurrection sense; passive ēgerthē names the divine action of raising. This is the dominant sense for resurrection contexts.
  4. To raise up, cause to appear, God "raising up" prophets, kings, deliverers (Acts 13:22, David; Acts 13:23, Jesus from David's seed; Judges 2:16 LXX).
  5. To rebuild, re-erect (a building, a structure), John 2:19 en trisin hēmerais egerō auton, "in three days I will raise it up" (the temple-of-His-body).

Theological force, the resurrection verb

Egeiro and G0386 - anastasis / anistēmi are the two primary NT resurrection lexemes. They overlap heavily, but with subtly different emphases:

  • Egeiro: God raises (transitive); Christ / the dead are raised (passive). The agency is foregrounded, typically God the Father's act upon Christ, or Christ's act upon Lazarus / Jairus's daughter. The passive ēgerthē ("He was raised") is the most common NT resurrection-formulation.
  • Anistēmi / anastasis: typically intransitive ("He rose"); the event of standing-up-from-death foregrounded.

The two lexemes interweave throughout the resurrection texts; choice between them is rarely doctrinally decisive, but egeiro dominates the kerygmatic formulae ("God raised Him from the dead") while anastasis dominates the conceptual / nominal references ("the resurrection of the dead").

1. The kerygmatic ēgerthē. The earliest pre-Pauline confession (1 Corinthians 15:3-5, transmitted "as I received it") uses egeiro: kai hoti etaphē, kai hoti egēgertai tēi hēmerai tēi tritēi kata tas graphas, "and that He was buried, and that He has been raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." The perfect egēgertai names the standing-state: He has-been-raised and remains so. This perfect-tense usage is dense in 1 Cor 15:4, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, Paul's resurrection apologetic leans on the abiding state, not just the past event.

2. The Father raised the Son. The agency in the resurrection of Jesus is usually predicated of the Father:

  • Acts 2:24, "God raised (anestēsen) Him up"
  • Acts 3:15; 4:10; 5:30; 10:40; 13:30, 33, 34, 37, "God raised Him from the dead" (ēgeiren throughout the apostolic preaching)
  • Romans 4:24, "Him who raised (egeiranta) Jesus our Lord from the dead"
  • Romans 8:11, "the Spirit of Him who raised (egeirantos) Jesus from the dead"
  • Romans 10:9, "ho theos auton ēgeiren ek nekrōn", confessional formula
  • Galatians 1:1, "God the Father, who raised Him from the dead"
  • 1 Peter 1:21, "God, who raised Him from the dead"

3. Jesus's prediction He will raise Himself. John 2:19, lysate ton naon touton kai en trisin hēmerais egerō auton ("destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up"), uses egeiro with Jesus as subject (active future). John 10:17-18 doubles down: "I lay down My life… exousian echō palin labein autēn (I have authority to take it up again)." The two-agency claim is non-contradictory: the Father raises the Son (kerygmatic confession); the Son raises Himself (Johannine self-disclosure); the Spirit is the one through whom the raising happens (Romans 8:11). The act is the joint operation of the Triune God on the same body.

4. Resurrection in the Christian's life. Paul redeploys egeiro for soteriological-eschatological registers:

  • Romans 6:4, "as Christ was raised (ēgerthē) from the dead… so we too might walk in newness of life"
  • Romans 6:9, "Christ, having been raised (egertheis) from the dead, dies no more"
  • Ephesians 2:6, "synēgeiren, He raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ"
  • Colossians 2:12; 3:1, believers are co-raised (synēgerthēte) with Christ; therefore, "seek the things above"
  • 1 Corinthians 6:14, "God raised the Lord and will raise (exegerei) us up through His power"

5. Resurrection of the dead, generic eschatological. Beyond the Christ-resurrection event, egeiro also names the general future raising of the dead:

  • 1 Corinthians 15:15-17, ei nekroi ouk egeirontai ("if the dead are not raised"), Paul's whole argument hangs on this
  • 1 Corinthians 15:35, 42-44, 52, the somatic transformation: speiretai en phthorai, egeiretai en aphtharsiai ("sown in corruption, raised in incorruption")
  • 1 Thessalonians 4:14, "those who have fallen asleep in Jesus, God will bring with Him" (with parallel resurrection-language)

Notable verses

Christ's resurrection, kerygmatic

Christ's raising of others (in Christ's earthly ministry)

Christ raising Himself

The general resurrection

  • John 5:21, 28-29, the Son raises whom He wills; the hour comes when all in the tombs hear His voice
  • John 6:39-40, 44, 54, anastēsō auton tēi eschatēi hēmerai, "I will raise him up on the last day" (using anistēmi)
  • 1 Corinthians 15:42-44, 52, the somatic resurrection
  • 2 Corinthians 4:14, "He who raised the Lord Jesus will raise (egerei) us also with Jesus"

Soteriological / participation

Patristic / scholarly note

The early Christian preaching is constituted around the ēgerthē declaration. Wolfhart Pannenberg (Jesus, God and Man, 1968) argues that the resurrection is the vindicating event that retrospectively legitimizes Jesus's pre-Easter claims; without the ēgerthē there is no Christianity. N. T. Wright (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003) gives a thousand-page argument that the early-church confession of egēgertai makes no sense as a development from either Jewish or pagan religious patterns and is best explained by the historical event itself; the abiding state sense of the perfect-passive form is decisive, the early church believed not just that something happened on Easter morning but that the resulting state persists.

The patristic tradition (Athanasius, On the Incarnation 20-32; Cyril of Alexandria, Dialogues on the Trinity) treats the multi-agent resurrection (Father raises, Son raises Himself, Spirit raises) as one of the strongest Trinitarian indicators in the kerygma, the same act, performed by all three Persons, attributable to each without contradiction. Modern Trinitarian theology (Moltmann, Jenson) returns to this multi-agent resurrection as the key intra-Trinitarian event.

In contemporary apologetics, the egēgertai of 1 Corinthians 15:3-5 is the point of departure for the Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas, Licona): the early credal transmission of the egēgertai formula, datable to within months of the events, is treated as the historical bedrock that any naturalistic theory of Christian origins must explain. Cf. Resurrection of Jesus.

Verses in this codex

See Obsidian's backlinks pane for every verse page linking here. Top-cited references using egeiro: 1 Corinthians 15.3-4, Romans 10.9 (when present), Acts 2:32 (when present), John 2.19-22 (when present).

See also