"Resurrection of the Dead" - Part 4 - "Awakening" the Dead

This article examines two different Greek verbs that Jesus used to describe his “being raised” from the dead. Both the Greek verbs are closely tied to the idea of “death” as “sleep,” (the subject of a previous article) but one verb is tied to sleep more than the other. That connection is obscured by the English translation of both words as “raised.” This also conflates the meanings of two different Greek verbs into one English word, not allowing English readers to see the differences between them.

These words are also interesting because they reveal differences in the four Gospels and how Jesus’s words may have been changed by the evangelists to suit their different audiences. It also provides evidence that Matthew, not Mark, was the first Gospel, used by the others as a source.

The Greek Verbs

The first Greek verb is egeiro (ἐγείρω). The primary meaning of this word is “awaken," “rouse,” or “stir up.” In various forms and in different contexts it means “wake up,” “stay awake,” and “to be awake.” It can also mean “to stir yourself,” “excite yourself,” or to “be excited” by passion.” It also forms various idioms. For example, when used with “ears” it means “prick up your ears.” It also means “raise” or “erect,” but usually in the context of constructing buildings. It is only consistently translated as “raise” in the NT and later works based on it.

Jesus uses egeiro in forty-two verses. At least five of those verses describe the “raising of the dead,” and at least five more refer to Jesus’s being raised, one of them by analogy. We list links to all those verses in the section on Jesus’s being raised.

The second verb is anistemi, (ἀνίστημι). This verb literally means “to make stand up.” It is much closer in meaning to “to raise up.” The “up” is from its prefix. The verb is used elsewhere in ancient Greek to refer to “raising the dead.” However, its secondary meaning was “to raise from sleep,” “wake up,” “to rouse to action,” and “to stir up.” This verb was aso used to refer to erecting a building. It also means “to rise to go,” “to set out,” and “to go away.” All of these meanings overlap with the various meanings of egeiro. This is also the verb form of the noun translated as “resurrection.”

Anistemi is used by Jesus in twenty-eight verses. So it is less common than egeiro. It is used in at least four verses to refer to the “raising of the dead.” And in at least four verses, this verb is used to describe Jesus being raised on the third day. Many of these verses are very similar to those in use egeiro, as we discuss below. Most of the verses using this verb on any topic are in Luke (thirteen out of twenty-eight). Half of the verses referring to Jesus being raised are Luke (the other two are Mark). Two of the four verses connecting anistemi to the word for “dead” are Luke.

Both of these verbs are used more frequently to refer to different forms of “raising” apart from “raising the dead.”

Reaffirming Death as Sleep

However, both are used to refer to waking up in the context of sleep, but they are never translated that way. For example, in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus finds the apostles sleeping, he uses egeiro in Matthew 26:46:

KJV: Rise, let us be going: behold, he is at hand that doth betray me.
Listeners Heard: Wake up! We should carry on. Look! He nears, the one turning me over.

Also referring to the sleeping apostles, Luke uses in anistemi in Luke 22:46:

KJV: ...Why sleep ye? rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.
Listeners Heard: Why do you sleep? Waking up, pray for yourselves in order that you don't enter into a trial.

The reason Jesus used verbs that mean “awaken” is clearly intentional: he saw death as sleep. That connection may be metaphorical, but it could also mean that there is a deeper similarity between the sleep of the living and the sleep of the dead. In any case, the connection between sleep and death is made much more obvious by translating one or both verbs as “awaken” in the context of death.

Of course, in the use of these words, such as his references to his apostles raising the dead, the sense may be more “rousing the dying,” or “awakening the spiritually dead” not those who are actually dead. This idea of the “living dead” is something we covered in this article.

It is also important to recognize that about seventy-five percent of the times Jesus uses these words he does not use them to refer to the dead. For example, he used both words as commands to people that he is healing but anistemi was only used in one of these verses (in Luke) while egeiro is used in about eight verses. This seems to indicate that Jesus saw healing as awakening.

The Awakening of Jesus

There are at least eight verses where Jesus refers to his own being raised from the dead using egeiro: Matthew 17:9, Matthew 17:23, Matthew 20:19, Matthew 26:32, Mark 10:34, Luke 7:14, Luke 9:22, and John 2:19. Three other verses, Matthew 10:8, Matthew 11:5, and  Luke 7:22 include “awakening the dying” among a list of different forms of healing, and may refer to the physically dead or those sick and dying. Notice how many of these are in Matthew. The first three of these are in the third-person and the passive voice, “he will be awakened.” One, Matthew 20:19, is the future tense, the other two (Matthew 17:9, Matthew 17:23) are in a tense that can apply to the future. The other verses have a variety of verb forms. John uses egeiro in a metaphorical way to refer to Jesus’s resurrection, see John 2:19:

KJV: Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.
Listeners Heard: Break up the temple, this one, and in three days, I will construct it.

Notice here that this is a technically correct use of “raise” because it refers to constructing a building. However, this is confusing because “razing” a building in English refers to destroying it.

There are also at least four verses where Jesus refers to his own rising with anistemi: Mark 9:31, Mark 10:34, Mark 12:25 Luke 16:31, Luke 18:33, Luke 20:36, and Luke 24:46, John 5:29, John 6:39 John 6:40, John 6:44, John 6:54, John 11:23, . Notice how egeiro appears in this context in all Gospels, but anistemi only appears in two. The first three of these references use the third-person, the future tense, and the middle voice, “he will awaken himself.” One, Luke 24:46, is an infinitive, so it has no person or voice. Its tense could be the future.

Several verses using egeiro are close parallels to other verses using anistemi. Compare Mark 10:34:

KJV: And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him: and the third day he shall rise again.
Listeners Heard: And he will be mocked him and will spit onto him and will scourge him and they will destroy [him] and within three days he will raise himself up.

To Matthew 20:19,

KJV: And shall deliver him to the Gentiles to mock, and to scourge, and to crucify [him]: and the third day he shall rise again.
Listeners Heard: And  they will give him over to the foreigners for that mocking and whipping and staking and on the third day he will be awakened.

Both verses contain uncommon words, “mock,” and “scourge,” but they end with different verbs, anistemi in Mark and egeiro in Matthew.

Conclusions

I find myself wondering if Jesus used both of these verbs interchangeably or if one was changed into another in the recording of Jesus’s words because it was used by one group of people more than another. This is suggested by the fact that anistemi is more common in Mark and especially Luke than egeiro, and both of those Gospels were written for Gentiles.

It is also interesting the egeiro was so frequently used in healing, and a couple of other interesting facts I see that may clarify (or confuse) the matter.

Egeiro was used three times more commonly in the Greek New Testament than in the Greek Old Testament. While anistemi was used four times more in the Greek Old Testament than in the New Testament. This is a very dramatic shift over the two or three hundred years that separated the two books. However, the Greek Old Testament was written in Alexandria, not Judea, where they spoke a more formal form of Greek.

At the same time, I see that Josephus Flavius, writing in the era shortly after Jesus, but who was Judean, used anistemi about half as much as egeiro. He prided himself on his use of formal Greek instead of the common (koine) used in Judea, but he could have been referring to his accent when speaking, not his choice of words.