Losing Your Way (4)
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.
Shabbat Shalom!!
Exist one more option: As any other rabbi Yeshua is using PaRDeS. Two years ago I talked with Rabbi Moshe Cohen Dorra, precisely about this issue (interpreting the Scripture) and even when he is Jewish he told me that this method must be present in our Master’s way to teach. Quite interesting this possibilty, isn’t it??
Toda raba
How exactly will PaRDeS solve this problem? One its surface, the issue is a linguistic one. There is NO Hebrew literal reverse translation for the Greek idea of body-soul dualism. So Pashat seems to retain the problem. At the Remez level, I don’t see how this hints at any other Hebrew texts that would illuminate such a dualism. Deresh might allow us to connect all other occurrences of basar, nephesh, gufah, gewiyya but we still end up with DEAD bodies or embodied persons. And Sod, how does the mystical level help us understand why a translator would use a concept that is not present in the Tanakh? We could suggest that rabbinic Judaism of the first Century embraced the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul (which is true in some cases), but is this Yeshua’s position? If Yeshua is a Torah reformer, why would He endorse a concept that clearly comes from Pythagoras? And how would such an endorsement affect the Jewish idea that the person “sleeps” in the ground until the Day of Judgment and the Resurrection?
I agree that PaRDeS is important, but I don’t think PaRDeS is the problem here. The problem is a competing paradigm that does not fit a word-for-word translation from Hebrew to Greek. As I will suggest tomorrow, there is much more to be revealed by looking for IDIOMATIC solutions.
Greetigs dr. Moen!
Thank you for your answer. Regarding my dialogue with Rabbi Cohen, I remember his reference to Jesus dialogue with Nicodemus. How many levels of interpretation can we find it?
Certainly we find Pashat, Remez and Deresh. I have a tendency to stay away from Sod because of its abuse. But the conversation with Nicodemus is entirely Jewish – in language and thought. The problem with Matthew 10:28 is that it appears to be NOT Jewish.
dr. Moen I really appreciate your time to take in consideration other options. This jigsaw puzzle is bigger than we can understand. We must search every piece and put it to where it belongs. Then we will have “echad” again (cf. Zac. 14:9) Shalom!
Shabbat Shalom Dr. Moen,
I am very new at this and understanding the hebrew worldview. It has certainly been stretching me! This particular “Today’s Word” has been a real struggle! We have always learned not only that we are soul and body, but spirit, soul and body. You don’t mention anything about spirit? Are you connecting spirit and soul and one?
Body, soul and spirit is just another division of the Greek paradigm about Man. Tripartite still retains the same problems. The reason for this three part division is that the New Testament Greek uses soma (body), psyche (spirit) (soul) and nous (mind), causing us to think that Man is made up of three parts. You will find this disintegrated human being view all over the Christian world. It leads to the idea that the “soul” is saved but the body doesn’t matter and to the idea that spiritual life is inward life, not outward obedience.
~ but now has been revealed by the appearing of our Savior Christ Jesus, who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel~ (2 Timothy 1.10)
~the thief comes not, but to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I AM come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly ~ (John 10.10)
Even though Hebraic thinking included an integrated being, I think important and often used passages may have helped to get us off the path. Think of this one.
“And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” Deut. 6:5
And that is restated in Mark 12:30 by Yeshua. It is difficult to rethink this and get the more accurate picture of humanity, when these verses, which (to us) almost hint at distinctions are so important to who we are.
Would it be too much of a stretch to think that if humans were made in the image of YHWH, and He is One (echad), we could think of ourselves in that sense, as it were, ‘whole’? I don’t know, just wondering how to work it out.
I have written about the Hebraic – and Greek – paradigms involved in this verse, which is part of the Shema. Please search the web site for elaboration. The English translation, based on the Greek tripartite view, misleads us. But the Hebrew view is quite different.
I would submit that while the meaning and implications of this verse is one to grapple with, there is a larger issue. The lens inside the frames through which you and I read the text is inhibiting our understanding. I have come to doubt that any can understand or appreciate the Apostles’ writings until we change glasses; or remove the ones we presently wear. The song suggests, “I can see clearly now that the rain is gone.” I would say, “I will see clearly when the ‘reign’ is gone”; the reign of the old paradigm. My comment is directed mainly to us well-meaning Gentile God-Fearers.
As I’ve been reading the words these past several day, the verse that struggling with in regard to all this is 1 Thess 5:23.
“Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be preserved complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
There are many ministers whose focus is on ministering to our human spirits. They testify that they are are seeing incredible inner healing in individuals that in the past took much longer through traditional inner healing methods.
Please give some insight into what Paul might have been saying in that reference to the spirit, soul & body.
Thank you for broadening our Greek thinking by enlightening us to the Hebraic mindset…it’s been challenging and good.
If you understand that Paul uses whatever Greek he can to capture Hebrew ideas, and you realize that there are no exact Greek words that perfectly reflect the Hebrew idea of the person, then you will see that Paul uses ALL the Greek words he has available in order to get the reader to understand that this isn’t about three PARTS but rather the WHOLE person. We must read within the paradigm, not assume that the words are to be understood according to OUR paradigm.
This 4 part series highlights the difficulty of helping others to understand the differences between a Greek world view and Hebraic. What you write should start great conversations about how we live today and how Yeshua wants us to live. Yet to bring these concepts up causes some great consternation. I hope you are correct in that Matt 10:28 was an idiom because it calls to all of us to live our lives as a living example of Torah.
Have arrived here this evening while researching “annihilationism.” These are insightful and constructive (hmmm, and helpfully destructive as well) thoughts and i thank you for sharing them. Perhaps you have more i can study that touches on this topic?
This is an excellent topic. Nicely done! Thank you! Pythagoras did us a HUGE disservice when he went slicing and dicing us up, separating what God had joined together to make a living soul (nephesh). We need all elements of our makeup to exist in any dimension. Amen.