anastasis

This is the New Testament's signature word for resurrection, and it carries the gospel's central hope: that God will not leave his faithful dead in the grave but will raise them to a new and lasting bodily life. Built from a verb meaning "to stand up," the word had meant ordinary things in earlier Greek (getting up from bed, setting up a statue, even the overthrow of a city), and where it touched the dead at all it was usually to deny that the dead could ever rise. Greek-speaking Jews were the first to press it into service for life beyond death, and the early church made it their own.

The senses sort out by who is raised and when. At the center stands the resurrection of Jesus himself, the event the first preachers testified to and built everything else on. Flowing out from it is the future, general resurrection of all the dead at the last day, the hope the Pharisees held and the Sadducees denied. Sharper still, Jesus calls himself "the resurrection" in person, the living source of the hope rather than just its first example.

What unites these is the single, concrete claim that the dead come back embodied. That is why the word startled Greek hearers, for whom escaping the body, not recovering it, was the whole point of dying. The senses differ only in scope and timing, never in that core.

In one early passage the word steps outside its usual resurrection meaning and takes the plainer sense it had long carried in everyday Greek: a rising up, a being raised in standing or status, set against a falling down. It is the opposite pole of a fall, the lift rather than the loss.

This sense appears only once in the New Testament, and even there many readers hear a deliberate hint of the resurrection sense underneath it. It is kept separate because the surface meaning genuinely differs: the verse is about people being raised or brought low in relation to God, not about the dead coming back to life.