Tag-Archive for » Hellenism «

Losing Your Way (4)

Saturday, August 04th, 2012 | Author:

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.  Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.  Matthew 10:28  ESV

Soul – Greek dualism proposes that Man consists of at least two parts:  body (soma) and soul (psyche).  According to Greek philosophical thinking following Plato, the psyche is the superior part; eternal, pure, heavenly and intended to return to God who created it.  The body is the earthly part; corrupt, material, base, filled with mortal desires, impure and the prison house of the soul.  Death separates these two parts, allowing the soul to escape the body and achieve freedom from the material world.  Adapting this thinking to Christian theology, the early Church fathers asserted that God is interested in a man’s “soul” rather than his body.  It is the soul that is eternal and therefore must be redeemed in order to dwell eternally with the Father.  Those who do not receive the forgiveness of God through Jesus Christ are bound to the eternal torment of their souls in hell.  Since the body is temporal, declarations of faith achieved through torture are justifiable because they save the soul from eternal punishment at the minor expense of the agony of the body.  What matters most is the saving of souls.  What matters least is the condition of men in this transient world.  In Christian thought, Jesus was crucified in Plato’s cave so that men might experience God’s glory.

The problem, of course, is that Yeshua wasn’t a Greek philosopher.

When we try to understand the Greek word psyche from a Hebrew perspective, we must first trace the Greek meaning back to its development following Pythagoras.[1]  Pythagoras introduced the idea of reward and punishment in the afterlife.  If there is going to be reward and punishment in another life, then there must be some essence of the person that survives death, and that essence, according to Pythagoras, is the “soul,” the psyche.  For the first time, men thought of the body as a prison of the soul.  By 500 BC, the idea of an immortal soul was part of the popular culture of ancient Greece.  From this point, Greek thinking developed the themes that the body was evil and wicked but the soul was good and pure.  In addition, the soul was the rational element that constituted what it meant to be human while the body was that part of man most connected to animal behavior.  By the time of Plato, the psyche was considered the center of thought, emotion and will – essentially all the human attributes – while the body was the weight the soul had to carry in this life until death finally released it from prison.

If this description of the soul resonates with your understanding of Christian theology, don’t be surprised.  Hellenism greatly influenced the thought of the early Church fathers.  Greek philosophy played a significant part in the formation of Christian doctrine in the first few centuries of the official Church.  The crucial idea of an afterlife of reward or punishment is now central to Christian thinking.  But it wasn’t part of the worldview of the Tanakh.  As rabbinic thought was influenced by Hellenism, the idea of reward and punishment in an afterlife became a part of Jewish thinking.  But there were significant differences.  Jewish thought never viewed the body as a prison of the soul.  After all, God created man embodied.  The body was not evil.  Embodied man made choices that determined his ultimate end, but even that end was not disembodied spirit.  As we have learned, Man is soma.  The implicit dualism between good and evil, spiritual and material, soul and body, is not part of Hebraic thinking.

This adds more difficulty to understanding Matthew 10:28.  All the Hebrew texts use the word nephesh for the Greek psyche.  But nephesh is not “soul” in opposition to “body.”  Nephesh is “person,” the whole of what it means to be an embodied human.  Only in Greek dualism is body opposed to soul.  If Yeshua used the word nephesh in this verse, then He could not be suggesting a separation of body and soul.  Nephesh is the homogenization of human being.  It is not divisible into parts.  That makes our text in Hebrew almost unintelligible as it stands.  “Do not fear those who can kill the dead body but cannot kill the entire embodied person.  Rather fear the one who can kill both the entire embodied person and the dead body in Gehenna.”  What in the world can this mean?  The point is this:  any translation of the Hebrew ideas into Greek categories of body and soul is unintelligible.

We are left with only two options if we insist on reading the text as it is written.  Either the translator of Yeshua’s Hebrew statement changed the thought into Greek categories that were not part of Yeshua’s original thinking OR Yeshua was also influenced by Hellenism and He embraced the Greek dichotomy of body and soul.  Neither of these seems acceptable.  That leaves us with two other choices.  First, the text itself is not original and was added to Matthew’s gospel by someone else who embraced Greek thinking OR, second, this entire text is some kind of idiomatic expression and is mangled in translation.  Now you get to decide.  What makes more sense given the Hebraic worldview of Yeshua?  And what does this mean for the integrity of the Greek text of our New Testament?

Topical Index:  soul, psyche, Hellenism, dualism, soma, body, Matthew 10:28


[1] It’s interesting that in the earlier Homeric age the word psyche meant “vital force” of life, much closer to the Hebrew idea of nephesh hayah than the subsequent idea of psyche found in Greek philosophy.

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Ontological Torah

Saturday, December 17th, 2011 | Author:

This is the book of the commandments of God, and the law that endures forever: all they that keep it shall come to life; but such as leave it shall die.  Baruch 4:1

Endures forever – (This is a bit scholarly.  Don’t give up too soon.)  The Book of Baruch is part of the canon of the Septuagint and the Vulgate (the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church).  It is not found in the Hebrew Tanakh or the Protestant Bibles.  It was written during about the same time as Maccabees, before the birth of the Messiah.  Since it isn’t in Protestant Bibles, you might ask why we should bother to consider any of its statements.  The answer is this:  Baruch gives us insights into the transition between the Testaments.  It allows us to see the development of certain doctrines that affected Jewish thought in the first century, and in particular, the influence of Hellenism on rabbinic thought.  Undoubtedly, Yeshua was familiar with Baruch.  Significantly, He never quotes from it.

Martin Hengel points out that Baruch articulates an ontological concept of Torah.[1]  In other words, Baruch suggests that Torah is the pre-existent order of the world, the incarnation of Wisdom, upon which all creation is based.  Therefore, all Torah commandments are universal in scope.  Torah is to be understood as the eternal light to all men, the absolute definition of what is good.  Personified, Torah is the mediator of creation.  The 613 commandments of Torah become the cosmic backdrop for all ethical action.  “From this there followed with logical consistency both the casuistic securing of the commandments by the oral Torah, the hedge round the law, and the scrupulous fixation of the text.  A further necessary development was the unique valuation of the study of the Torah, for only on the basis of constant study was it possible to observe the commandments correctly.   . . . This fact also explains the growing intellectual power of the scribes: they were the only authoritative exponents of the Torah, and as the ‘wise men’ has the key to the right understanding of it and thus to the mysteries of the present and the future world.”[2]

Before you stop reading from sheer boredom, do you realize what this means?  It means that by the time Yeshua walked the earth, rabbinic Judaism had already evolved a hierarchy of professional clerics, a select group of scholars who held sway over the interpretation of Torah.  In other words, the understanding of Torah for the common man was replaced by the exegesis of the scribes who were not simply copyists.  They were the keepers of the text, the ones you had to ask if you really wanted to know what it meant.  In Christian parallel, these men acted like the priests in the Catholic tradition.  They interpreted the Law for the people.

Now you understand why Yeshua has so much conflict with these men.  First, He does not come from their circles.  He was not trained by their professional academies.  He was an outsider.  Secondly, He taught that ordinary men can understand Torah.  He explained Torah in common images and terms.  He encouraged ordinary people to know what  Torah said and live by it.  And He did not participate in the mystical evaluation of Torah.  On every count, He was a threat.

But there is more.  Hengel points out that new exegetical methods were adopted by these professionals, methods that were based in Alexandrian philology.  Alexandria was heavily influenced by Greek Hellenism.  This lead to the beginnings of Jewish mysticism (Kabala) and to a universalist view of Torah.  What does this mean?  Hengel notes, “this influence was effective not only in combining the divine ordering of the world and personal norms of life through the Torah, but also in the unobjectionable moral and religious conduct.  A teacher-pupil relationship was formed in analogy to the Greek philosophical schools which included chains of tradition, the conception of a sacrosanct corpus of holy writings given directly by God or inspired by him, the development of a differentiated exegetical method and finally the adoption of a wealth of foreign views,”[3] 

Hengel concludes that this shift brought about the Jewish view that Torah belonged to Israel, not as an historical revelation to its ancestors, but as God’s sign of the rejection of all other nations.  Torah became an “essentially unhistorical entity,” a universal and cosmic framework given exclusively to Israel.  Therefore, if a man wanted to understand the world correctly, he had to become Jewish, a follower of the Jewish Torah.

This helps us understand the enormous tension between Paul and the Judaizers.  Gentile conversion was not simply a question of proper incorporation into a believing community, it is a matter of who will be Jewish since being Jewish is the key to understanding Torah.  When Paul suggests that Gentiles are accepted by God on the basis of grace, he challenges the entire philosophical and theological basis of the scribes’ view of Torah.  Of course they would object – strenuously!

Once again we discover that a lack of historical understanding of the culture and its influences removes our ability to appreciate the arguments and events in the New Testament text.  We read the Bible in the dark.  We don’t see it in its context.  We moralize the text without knowing why these men wrote as they did.

The Bible is devotional, but it was not written so that we might have a nice religious feeling or find comfort in our souls.  The Bible is a book of conflict – between Man and God and between men.  It is God’s involvement worked out in the history of men’s motivations.  Like any other literature, we need to know the why and the what.  And since we are so far removed from the thought of these ancient writers, we will have to work a little harder.  Much harder, unfortunately, than simply opening the Bible and pointing to a random verse for today’s encouragement.

Topical Index:  Baruch 4:1, Torah, Hellenism


[1] Martin Hengel, Judaism and Hellenism, p. 172.

[2] Ibid., p. 172.

[3] Ibid., p. 174

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