Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psyche_(psychology)

What exactly are the meanings of these words as used in Genesis and by Paul?

Steven Carr

FOr Paul, psyche was what made dead matter live, and losing it meant you had dead matter again.

As you did not get psyche back, the dead matter would not live again.

This is why there is such a contrast between Adam's body (which consisted of dead matter animated by psyche which would be lost) and the body of Jesus, which was spirit, and so eternal. 'Life-giving' as opposed to Adam's body which was perishable, and did in fact perish.

Clivedurdle

So what did Paul and the gospel authors think Christ was doing? I come to bring you life in all its fullness?

It does sound like a magical super eternal spirit life given through a ritual mechanism of a death on a cross and reenacted by a ritual of eating bread and wine.

There is a snake oil logic to it all - new improved eternal life in comparison to ordinary psyche life and death by believing x and doing y.

Is that not a reasonable explanation of what we read in the new testament?

Lógos Sokratikós

The RCC contradicts Paul, then. See: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12792a.htm
... but coincides with Job ("I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God. Whom I myself shall see, and my eyes shall behold, and not another; this hope is laid up in my bosom" Job 19:25-27).

Ah, the bible, nothing closer to the speech of a madman!

Chili

The soul belongs to the animal man and the rational condition of being is just an add-on wherein we are human (see Aristotles Cathegories on this). It is a condition similar to naked or hairy but just a little more complicated because we are enriched by it.

Ben C Smith

Genesis 2.7 (not 2.9) says that Adam became a living soul, not that a soul was breathed into him. What was breathed into him was breath (Hebrew ×*שמה, Greek πνοη).

No, having breath blown into dead matter (clay) turned the matter into a living psychē.

Just quoting the text here. Nothing fancy.

Ben.

Clivedurdle

Another one for the collection! And this might explain the writing of Mark!

GakuseiDon

Ah, but what about all those pagan myths which have a bodily resurrection and which supposedly influenced early Christianity? You know, like Osiris, etc? Apparently you can't go two steps in the "world of myth" without running into some physically resurrected god.

And what about the Raglan Scale? "His body is not buried", etc. Looks like Paul was fairly unique in his beliefs here.

Steven Carr

That is true.

But the material had something added to it.

And Paul does say that human beings (or at least Christians) consist of psyche, soma and pneuma.

Those were things, in Paul's view, not adjectives.

Steven Carr

SO Genesis 2 says that Adam became a living soul, and Paul says Jesus became a spirit.

Presumably then Jesus was not made of what Adam was made of, as we know the constituents of what makes a living soul. The recipe is described in Genesis.

Paul , of course, has no idea what the resurrected Jesus was made of, as nobody had seen one.

But he reminds the Corinthians that it was a heavenly thing , and that heavenly things were made of different materials to earthly things, just like a fish is made of a different thing to the moon.