Made alive ζῳοποιέω
A verb with a very short list of subjects
Greek has ordinary words for living. This is not one of them. Zōopoieō is two words welded together — life and make — and it means to make alive something that was not. Older Bibles translate it “quicken,” which used to mean exactly that.
It shows up eleven times in the New Testament, spread over ten verses. Now ask the plain question you would ask of any verb: who does it? Read the list and you find God, the Son, and the Spirit. In the New Testament this is not something a person does for himself.
Walk the same row in March, then again in April. Nobody swapped the trees out. Nobody patched them, either. Something moved down the row and the bare wood broke into blossom. That is the difference between repairing a thing and making it alive.
Two men, two families
Paul is not counting heads here. He is naming two heads. The sentence has a shape you can see: in Adam — in Christ. Each “all” reaches as far as its own head’s family reaches. That is the frame this whole scene works in (the two-Adams thread), and it is the reason the verb matters. Dying is what one family does. Being made alive is what the other family has done to it.
The one who received it, and the one who gives it
“And so it is written” is Paul telling you he is quoting. The line he quotes is Genesis 2:7 — “and man became a living soul” — with one word added: first. He calls Adam the first man because he is about to name a last one.
Go back and read what Genesis 2:7 actually describes. A man is formed from the dust of the ground, and then God gives him a breath he did not own. The first Adam is on the receiving end of the whole verse. Paul takes that sentence and finishes it on the other side of the transaction: the last Adam is not merely alive. He is life-giving. One man got the breath. The other hands it out.
Watch who does the verb
One verse, the verb twice, and both times it belongs to somebody who is not us. Jesus puts himself on the Father’s side of it. That is the claim the rest of John 5 is arguing about.
Same verb, now aimed at readers. And Jesus says elsewhere where the power sits: “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63).
What cannot do it
Paul also uses this verb to rule something out. “If there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law” (Galatians 3:21). It is an if he means as a no. Rules can tell you what to do. Rules cannot make a dead thing live — not the law at Sinai, and, if Paul’s statement is as wide as it sounds, not the commandment in the garden either. Something else has to happen, and it needs a subject who can do this verb.
The making-alive verb sits at the trunk of the dawn sky, where the breath given in the garden meets the breath given again.
Open the dawn sky →1 Corinthians 15 is one of the most argued chapters in the Bible, and the arguments are mostly about this verb’s neighbors rather than the verb itself: how far the second “all” reaches, when the making-alive happens, and in what order. Those are real discussions, and careful readers land in different places. What this page shows is the verb’s job description — what it does, and who does it — not a settled timetable. “A quickening spirit” in 15:45 is read more than one way too; we have quoted it and left the reading to you. And a word study can tell you what a word does. It cannot tell you by itself who is included when Paul uses it.