nekros

The word's basic force is simply the absence of physical life. It names a state (dead, not alive) or the people who are in that state (the dead). In both roles it appears throughout the Gospels, Acts, and the letters with unremarkable plainness: a man fell dead, a woman was found dead, the disciples saw someone who looked like a corpse.

By far the largest single use in the New Testament is the formula ek nekron, "from the dead" or "among the dead," which became the standard idiom for resurrection. Jesus is raised from the dead; he is the firstborn from the dead; believers are baptized into his death and raised as he was raised from the dead. This idiom is so fixed and so frequent that it shaped the creed, the letters, and Christian preaching from the beginning. Nearly half of all occurrences of the word fall into this pattern.

The word also functions as a substantive, "the dead," naming a class of people: those who have died and whose fate stands open to divine judgment or resurrection. "The living and the dead" became a paired formula for the whole of humanity, present and past.

The New Testament stretches the word beyond physical death in two directions, and both draw from the core meaning.

The first direction is spiritual death: being cut off from God the way a corpse is cut off from life. Paul describes his readers before conversion as having been dead in trespasses and sins (Ephesians 2:1, 2:5; Colossians 2:13). The prodigal in Luke 15 is said by his father to have been dead and to have come back to life. In Ephesians 5:14 a call to awake echoes a resurrection summons directed at people still walking around. The force in all these cases is moral and relational: not biological death, but the complete absence of responsive life toward God.

The second direction is ineffectiveness: something that has no power to do what it is meant to do. James uses the word twice for faith that performs no action (faith without works is dead). The letter to the Hebrews twice speaks of dead works, deeds that have no life-giving power, unable to cleanse the conscience. Romans 6:11 exhorts believers to reckon themselves dead to sin, meaning sin no longer exercises its old authority over them. In these uses death names a kind of practical nullity, the absence of the effect something would otherwise produce.

The two figurative directions are related but distinct. Spiritual death is a condition a person is in; deadness to sin or of faith-without-works is a quality of a relationship or an act. The word's flexibility is possible because both uses borrow the same core image: death as total absence of animating power.