Just what the relationship is that exists between the soul and the body Jesus does not describe. If the words put into his mouth by Luke, "a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see I have,"[1] were actually his, he apparently distinguished between a ghost and a genuine human personality. But these words introduce so many difficulties, both critical and philosophical, that it will hardly be advisable to rest much argument upon them until they have been given a more careful examination than is here desirable.
In general Jesus distinguished between only physical and spiritual phenomena, and his language, though never technical, is yet sufficiently definite to make it certain that he never held to the trichotomy that possibly characterized the cruder psychology of the early Hebrew scriptures. At all events, the one class of phenomena did not spring from the other. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. Only that born of the spirit is spirit.[2]
It would certainly be inadmissable to consider his reply to the lawyer, "Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy understanding,"[3] as anything more than a Hebrew cumulative emphasis.[4] So far was Jesus from being a trichotomist as sometimes to seem to approach a sort of psychological monism, in which the unity of body and soul constitutes a single life.[5] However this may be, the significance of Paul's treatment of the resurrection of Jesus the type of the race, lies
- ↑ Luke 24:39.
- ↑ John 3:6.
- ↑ Matt. 22:37. These words are variously reported of the other evangelists. They are a quotation of Deut. 6:4 sq., apparently modified by popular Greek psychological expressions.
- ↑ It is true, however, that there seems at times a shade of difference between ψυχή (life, soul) and πνεύμα (spirit). Thus in Matt. 23:35, and Luke 6:9; 12:19, the soul is apparently physical life, the sensuous nature, while "spirit" is generally used when the thought is concerned with moral and religious matters, and especially with the soul's divine origin. Yet it is also true that in Matt. 10:28 the former of the words overlaps in meaning that of the other, while in Matt. 27:50, Luke 8:55, the reverse is the case. And these are by no means the only instances. See in addition Wendt, Fleisch und Geist, p. 46.
- ↑ Such is the implication of the destruction of the body in Gehenna (Matt. 5:29, 30; 10:28). For even if due allowance is made for the figurative language, the reference is clearly to moral suffering. In Matt. 6:25 the Hebrew parallel arrangement may not impossibly hint at a similar conception. Yet these and similar passages imply nothing as to a identity of the physical and psychical substances.
