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Some Final Thoughts on Body and Soul

Saturday, August 04th, 2012 | Author:

By now you have struggled through the implications of Matthew 10:28, Yeshua’s supposed endorsement of the “body-soul” dualism that we have been exploring for the last 4 days.  Perhaps we haven’t solved the riddle of the translation, but we have at least learned these few things:

1.  The “body-soul” or “body-mind-soul” or “body-spirit-soul” concepts found in most Christian theology are akin to those Greek philosophical systems found in Pythagoras and Plato.  They do not have readily available counterparts in Hebraic thought.

2.  Hebrew has no dualistic terms that approximate the categories found in Greek philosophy.  The Tanakh does not embrace, endorse or support the idea of the separation of Man into various parts.

3.  Since we believe Yeshua did not embrace this Greek dualism, the text in Matthew is either a) corrupt, b) an addition by someone else, c) a mangled translation of an attempt to convey a Hebrew concept in Greek language, or d) an idiomatic expression in Hebrew that was mistranslated as a word-for-word concept into Greek.

4.  We ruled out a) and b) above and determined that the most likely explanation for Matthew 10:28 is that it was spoken as a Hebrew idiom but badly translated into Greek, and subsequently forced to fit a Greek paradigm.  Since the Church had already adopted a Greek metaphysics by the time our versions of the Greek text of Matthew came into existence, it would not have caused in startled suspicion to read the text as “body and soul.”  The culture already assumed such a dualism was biblical.

With this in mind, we suggested that the appropriate idiomatic translation might be something like this: “Do not fear those who are able to inflict terrible means of death upon the body.  Rather fear the one who is capable of wasting away life.”  This idiomatic expression is also ironic (a common tactic employed by Yeshua) because the one who is able to waste away life is NOT God but rather you and I.  In other words, Yeshua is teaching us that not fulfilling God’s purposes for our lives is the equivalent of destroying life and WE ARE RESPONSIBLE.

Why is this so difficult to discern from the current Greek of Matthew 10:28 and virtually all the English translations?  Because English adopts the Greek paradigm of Man, breaking the unity of the embodied person into pieces which are subsequently treated differently.  To put is simply, English (and Greek) do NOT have the needed linguistic forms or ideas necessary to translate this Hebrew idiomatic expression.  Much like the HEbrew concept of hesed, Greek is simply inadequate to convey the Hebrew meaning.

Try talking to someone about what it means to be human but do not use any reference to body or soul.  You will see just how much our own thought patterns and language is saturated with this Greek idea.  Try explaining that the biblical text does not contain the idea of an immortal, disembodied soul and you will probably be considered a heretic.  Try explaining what it means to “sleep in the earth” until the Day of Judgment.  All of our Christian ideas about heaven and hell, reward and punishment, eternal existence, etc. come under attack.  No wonder people have such a terrible time when they try to answer the question, “What would this have meant to the audience that first heard it?”

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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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Losing Your Way (3)

Friday, August 03rd, 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

Body – In this verse, the translator of Yeshua’s comment uses the Greek word soma.  We might expect soma to be the substitute for basar (Hebrew: flesh), but the LXX has no fixed relationship between soma and basar, probably because Hebrew has no special word for “body.”  Sometimes basar is translated by sarx.  Sometimes the Greek soma translates the Hebrew gewiyya or geshem.  Schweizer notes, “The term soma offers a concept that is not yet developed in Hebrew and hence the translators use it with some hesitation.  In the LXX it never refers to an inorganic body, nor to reality as distinct from words, nor to a macro- or microcosmic organism, nor to a city or people.  Unlike sarx, it does not have the intrinsic character of creatureliness or sin or earthliness.  It can denote the person as object . . .and it also suggests the human totality with the sense of corporeality. . .  soma does not occur in relation to sacrifice or to activity but in relation to God, to others, or to various forces.  The person does not stand aloof from the soma.  Soul and body together describe corruptible humanity over against wisdom or reason, but anthropological dualism arises only when soul or reason is set in juxtaposition to the body, e.g., when the body is abandoned to death but the true I survives.”[1]

Things get even more complicated when we consult the Hebrew text of the Delitzsch gospel of Matthew.  In this verse, the Hebrew word is gufah, a word that appears only twice in the Tanakh and clearly means dead body.  The Shem Tov Hebrew text uses the word gewiyya which also usually means dead body.  The only cases where gewiyya means a living body are cases where defeat and humiliation are also present.  This raises an important question.  If Yeshua used either of these terms, how does it make any sense to connect them to “kill” or “destroy”?  Can someone kill a dead body?  Once more we are faced with what appears to be in internal contradiction – or at the least an absurdity.  The only resolution seems to push us in the direction of some idiomatic expression, not a literal declaration about “body and soul.” (As we shall see, the Hebrew texts also use nephesh for the Greek word psyche – soul – but nephesh doesn’t mean “soul” in the sense that Greek uses the term, or, for that matter, in the way we use the term.)

We know that the dualism of body and soul is introduced via Greek philosophy.  While it is present in rabbinic thought after 400 BC, it is not present in the Tanakh.  On this basis, we conclude that it is not the underlying thought of Yeshua’s warning.  This conclusion is supported by the fact that Paul does not endorse the Greek dualism either.  In Paul’s writings, soma is a technical term for “person.”  Paul endorses the older meaning of the Tanakh that human existence is embodied existence.  The body is not simply an outer shell that surrounds the eternal “soul.”  The soma is the person.  “soma can be understood as man as the object of an action and man as the subject of an action.  He has a relationship with himself.”[2]  This should remind us of the origin of Man, a creature who is defined by relationship, not by biological or spiritual elements.  In fact, Genesis chapter 2 suggests that the formation of the woman taken from the man creates an essential relationship that was once involuntary and internal but is now voluntary and external.

Before we look at the idea of “soul” (Greek psyche), we can offer a temporary idiomatic translation of this verse.  “Do not fear those who are able to cause terrible forms of death but cannot kill the nephesh [soul?].  Rather, fear him who can be cut off from life by wasting it away [in Gehenna?].”  Will this idiomatic translation suffice?  That depends on what Yeshua meant with the word He used that is translated as psyche (soul).

Topical Index: body, soma, soul, psyche, kill, apokteino, destroy, apollumi, Matthew 10:28


[1] Eduard Schweizer, soma, TDNT (Abridged), p. 1143.

[2] J. A. Motyer, “Body” in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, Vol 1., p. 235.

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Losing Your Way (2)

Thursday, August 02nd, 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

Destroy – [WARNING:  This a long because the subject is complicated.]  Does Yeshua teach the destruction of the soul?  If He does, doesn’t this stand in utter contradiction to the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul?  Is this verse really nothing more than an endorsement of Greek dualism in the mouth of a Hebrew prophet?

Since it seems very unlikely that Yeshua taught Greek dualism, we will have to replace this Greek language with Hebraic concepts.  That means “Do not fear those who kill” also requires some re-interpretation.  The verb for “to kill” in Greek is apokteino, an intensive form of the verb kteino, “to slay, to kill, to destroy.”  The Hebrew parallel is harag (e.g. Psalm 78:47), but the Hebrew verb is never about “eternal” life.  It is about killing, war, fratricide and the slaughter of men and animals in this life.  We noticed that the Greek text distinguishes two verbs for the termination of life in this verse.  Whatever Yeshua said in the second half of the verse, He apparently did not employ the same verb used in the first half, otherwise it would make no sense for the translator to provide two different Greek verbs, apokteino and apollumi.  We may conclude from an Hebraic perspective that the opening statement of this verse is about death as we know it on this earth, especially horrendous death as a result of aggravated violence.  The intensive Greek verb provides justification for an idiomatic translation such as “Do not fear those who are able cause terrible forms of death.”  We still have to deal with the application of this action to “body and soul,” but before we can do that, we need to examine the second verb in this verse.  It isn’t apokteino.  That itself is strange.  Why is the second verb different than the first?  Aren’t both verbs about death?  What are we to do with apollumi – to destroy?

In his article on the Greek word apollumi, Albrecht Oepke draws attention to the “familiar Jewish expression avad nephsho, an idiom for ‘trifling away one’s life.’”[1]  This Jewish background is particularly relevant to this text.  It helps us distinguish between the Greek implication that Yeshua is speaking about eternal damnation and the Hebrew implication that Yeshua is speaking idiomatically about the consequences of living a lawless existence.

The apparent theological contradiction in the Greek text is set aside if the words in this Greek translation really attempt to capture a Hebrew idiom about pointless, lawless living.  If Yeshua’s worldview is rabbinic, first century, conservative Judaism, then the Hebrew idiom would have readily come to mind when He uttered these words.  His audience would not think about a Greek dichotomy between body and soul since no such dichotomy existed in Hebrew thought and there is no word for “body” in Hebrew.  Instead, they would have been reminded of the absolute necessity of purposeful living, that is, living according to God’s instructions in order to accomplish God’s purposes here and now.  They would have heard Yeshua teaching about the senseless waste of a life that comes from not acknowledging the sovereignty of God.

Let’s attempt to understand this verse from its Hebrew perspective.  First we should note that it won’t do much good to attempt a word-for-word backwards translation from Greek to Hebrew.  Idioms resist wooden word-for-word renderings.  Idiomatically, the opening thought of this verse is probably something like this:  “Do not fear those who are able to bring about violent termination of life.”  The idiom does not allow us to posit a distinction between body and soul.  But if our idiomatic translation is correct, we still have to deal with the question, “How come the Greek text says ‘body and soul’?”

Suddenly things get far more complicated.  We have already acknowledged that there is no Hebrew word for the Greek idea of “body” (soma).  When soma is used for an Hebraic concept, the meaning is always the whole person or even a dead body, but never a body as distinct from a “soul.”  Schweizer says, “There is no sense of his [man’s] standing at a distance from himself or regarding his corporeality as something which can finally be parted from him.”[2]  In other words, even when the biblical texts use the word soma (body), the Hebraic worldview does not mean that the “body” is a separate element of human existence.  As Bultmann remarks, “Man does not have a soma; he is soma.”[3]  The fundamental Hebraic concept of human existence is embodied existence.  Every translation that suggests a division of human existence into separate ontological parts relies on a Greek paradigm, not a Hebrew one.

What does this mean for Matthew’s account of Yeshua’s warning?  It means that Yeshua could not have suggested the supposed separation of body and soul.  The translator introduced this division because there was no other way to capture the Hebraic point of view.  Why would the translator change the Hebrew idiom in this way?  The answer to this question comes from a brief historical analysis of rabbinic literature prior to the birth of Yeshua.

Rabbinic thought began to be influenced by Greek philosophy as early as 400 BC.  By the time of the Maccabees, the Greek distinction between body and soul was already present in rabbinic written material.  Therefore, in The Book of Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Testament of Judah and 2 Esdras we find the distinction between body and soul with the emphasis placed on the eternal and undefiled soul in opposition to the material, temporal and corrupt body.  In these writings, the rabbis suggested that death separated body and soul; that the body remains on earth but the soul is taken to heaven.  This teaching stands in opposition to the older teaching of the Tanakh that the embodied person returns to the earth at death but is resurrected at the Judgment.  This means that by the time Yeshua taught, the rabbinic view, influenced by Hellenism, existed alongside the more conservative view of the Tanakh.  It is possible that the translator of Yeshua’s Hebrew statement recorded in Matthew was also influenced by this rabbinic material and therefore converted Yeshua’s Hebraic view into a view that would have been acceptable by rabbinic Judaism in the first century but did not reflect the older view of the Tanakh.

While we may not be able to prove this hypothesis, what we do know for certain is this:  the idea that Man is composed of parts (whether body and soul or body, mind and soul-spirit) is not found in Hebraic thought before the influence of Hellenism and is not consistent with the view of the Tanakh.  If Yeshua is a reformer, one who calls the people of Israel back to the strict teaching of the Tanakh, it is simply impossible that He would embrace the Greek dualism of body and soul.  It is far more likely that His words have been reconstructed in translation.

Topical Index:  body, soma, soul, psyche, kill, apokteino, destroy, apollumi, Matthew 10:28

 

[1] Albrecht Oepke, apollumi, TDNT, Vol. 1, p. 394.

[2] Eduard Schweizer, soma, TDNT, Vol. 7, p. 1048.

[3] R. Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, Vol. 1, p. 194.

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Losing Your Way (1)

Wednesday, August 01st, 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

Destroy – It is my intention, over the next several days, to deal with the concept of body and soul.  We can begin with this verse since it is often used to support a Christian separation of body and soul.  This study will take some time as it is difficult to articulate the changes in thought between Greek and Hebrew on these topics.  Both languages lack words that allow us to translate from one paradigm to the other.  Furthermore, the implications for our views of death, heaven, the afterlife and many eschatological topics are quite significant.  We begin with Epictetus.

Epictetus, a Greek philosopher of the first century (born 55 AD), said that the death of the body is not to be feared, but only the death of the soul.[1]  Does that sound familiar?  You thought that Yeshua’s statement was unique, but what about Epictetus?  Are we to assume that Yeshua did nothing more than mimic what Greek philosophy was already thinking?  After all, Epictetus’ statement comes from a chain thought among the Greeks that goes back to at least pre-Platonic views.  Is this verse, so often used to support a body-soul dualism, just warmed-over Greek thinking?

As soon as we begin to examine the ideas, we are confronted with monumental translation problems in this verse in Matthew.  The problems are not simply about which words to use to translate the Greek text into English.  Nor are the problems simply about translating Matthew’s Greek back into the original language of Yeshua.  In this verse, translation must arise from understanding the opposing paradigms of the Greek and Hebrew world.  The result of an investigation into the thought structures behind the words leaves us, perhaps, with an entirely different understanding of what Yeshua really said.  All of the difficulties begin with the fact that in Hebrew there is no word for body.  If that is the case, then how is it possible for the Greek translation of Yeshua’s speech to include the dualism of “body and soul”?

When we read this verse from the paradigm of the Church, we often think Yeshua is expressing a warning about our spiritual condition.  We are seduced by the “body and soul” dichotomy inherent in Greek thought.  Therefore, we conclude that Yeshua must also embrace this dichotomy.  Because we assume that the Platonic distinction between the material and the spiritual is a biblical idea, we imagine Yeshua is concentrating on the “soul” of a man rather than a man’s physical body.  We then conclude that the most important thing in life is not life here (which is transient, corrupt and without eternal value) but rather life somewhere else – in heaven, of course.  This philosophical orientation causes us to read this verse as if Yeshua is saying, “Don’t worry about your life in this world.  Worry about your life in the next world,” or “Don’t worry about men who can only kill your physical existence.  Worry about God who can destroy both the physical and spiritual in hell.”

Even without the issues that arise when we try to back-translate this text into Hebrew, we are left with internal contradictions in the Greek itself.  First, we should notice that this verse opposes “to kill” (apokteino) with “to destroy” (apollumi).  While the meaning of the two verbs is similar, it is not identical.  If it were, there would be no reason to use two different Greek verbs in the same sentence.  Whatever Yeshua actually said, the Greek translator thought it necessary to use two different verbs to capture that thought.  But even the use of apollumi is problematic.  In what sense is the body and soul destroyed in hell?  The adoption of the Platonic idea of the immortality of the soul stands in opposition to the plain meaning of this statement.  According to Christian-Platonic doctrine, the soul is eternal.  It cannot be destroyed.  Therefore, the translation of apolesai as “who can destroy” contradicts the Christian idea of the soul.  Even if we are tempted to reduce the strength of the translation to “who can kill,” then we must ignore the intensive apo attached to the verb (apo + ollumi) and we must offer some reasonable explanation why this verb isn’t the same as apokteino, used in the opening phrase.

You can’t have it both ways.  If this verse is an accurate rendering of Yeshua’s statement, then either the soul is eternal and cannot be destroyed (or killed) or Yeshua is correct and the soul can be destroyed.  Is the doctrine of the eternal soul correct, and Yeshua wrong, or is it the other way around?  Are we really facing theological contradictions or is something else amiss?

It seems to me that the real problem is not in these apparent contradictions but rather in the Greek rendering of Yeshua’s Hebraic thought.

Stay tuned.

Topical Index:  Matthew 10:28, apollumi, destroy, apokteino, kill, body, soul

 

[1] Eduard Schweizer, soma, TDNT, Vol. 7, p. 1036 referencing Epictetus, Discourses, I, 5, 4.

YESTERDAY I FORGOT to post a Today’s Word.  To make up for this oversight, here is a short audio file about the final lessons we learn from our study of Ruth.

If you haven’t followed the audio study of Ruth, you can do so by clicking here.

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But I’m Afraid

Saturday, September 26th, 2009 | Author:

YHWH is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? Psalm 27:1

Fear – Maybe it helps to be the king. I can see why David doesn’t fear anyone or anything. He has God on his side and he’s the king. That’s a big advantage. But what about the rest of us? We don’t command armies, order legislation or have the power of life and death in our hands. Does this verse really apply to us? I hope it does, but if I’m really honest, I’m still afraid. I’m afraid of public humiliation. I’m afraid of economic collapse. I’m afraid of betrayal. Or cancer. Or whatever is on the top of this list for today. Funny thing is that David could easily have all those fears too, plus some big ones that go with being the king. So, what makes it possible for David to say that he’s not afraid?

If we read very carefully, we discover that David doesn’t actually say he’s not afraid. He just says there is really no one to fear. That’s not the same as feeling afraid anyway. But David has a very good point. No person should make us quake because God is sovereign over every man. David says God is his light. David sees what life is like because he looks at life from God’s point of view. That clarifies a lot. All those things that I fear start to fade away when I see what the world looks like through God’s eyes. When God shines the light on the dark, I see the truth. He’s there. There’s no monster under my bed.

David also says that YHWH is his salvation. That’s not quite the evangelical word we use. For David, salvation is yishee, deliverance and rescue. It’s very here-and-now stuff, not pie-in-the-sky get-to-heaven thinking. I’m in danger. YHWH rescues me. That’s salvation. It’s tangible and temporal. Yes, I experience rescue from everlasting death (is that an oxymoron?) but the focus of my attention is right now because I live in the right now.

God’s point of view and His tangible rescue mean that I don’t fear anyone. The Hebrew verb yare has five different senses (see TWOT, Vol. 1, p. 399). The first is the emotion of fear. David’s claim doesn’t rule this out. The second is the intellectual anticipation of evil. God’s light and rescue eliminate this, if I stop to mediate on the truth. The third sense of fear shifts toward positive expressions. “Fear the Lord” is the equivalent of showing awe and reverence. Fourth comes fear as righteous behavior. Finally, there is a use of yare in the sense of formal religious worship. So, you see that David is occupied with the distinction between the first and second sense; both negative. But one is normal emotional reaction; the other results from a failure to recognize the goodness of God.

Yeshua employs these subtle distinctions in Matthew 10:28: “and do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy soul and body in hell.” Yeshua’s comment is a word play on the multiple uses of yare. There is only one to really fear – and what “fear” means before that one is the crux of the matter.

Maybe I don’t have so much to fear after all. Maybe my emotional reaction (fear) just leads me to settled confidence in the Lord of hosts (fear). One fear becomes grounds for another fear. Right?

Topical Index: fear, yare, Matthew 10:28, Psalm 27:1

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