Chapter 3
Biblical Understandings of Flesh, Body and Soul
The dominance of Pauline religious anthropology
If Graeco-Roman philosophical thought did not produce a specific term for the concept of asceticism, neither did the New Testament. Ascetic practices are evident in John the Baptist, and in various aspects of Christ’s life, such as His withdrawal into the desert to pray, the simple non-materialistic life shared with itinerant disciples and the passing on of charismatic abilities. From its earliest manifestation in the desert, asceticism drew inspiration from the Bible, and biblical teachings on the body greatly influenced Christian moral teachings and practices. Perhaps the single most important contributor to the terminology of religious anthropology is St Paul, whose experience of Christ became an interpretation of the Jesus event, providing a theological grammar for subsequent generations. Paul’s understanding of the new law given by Christ was grasped by Christians in their attempt to live as part of the body of Christ, and explained how Christ’s death and resurrection ensured salvation for those who chose to share in His sufferings. So the word ‘body’ can mean a corporate sense of identity, an organism or means of maintaining a community as well as the physical aspect of the human being. In the Epistles we see the beginnings of a theological explanation of the doctrine that God is manifest in the form of the divine/human Christ; Paul’s use of first and second Adam typology emphatically connects the bodies of ordinary people to the body of Christ. Paul also laid the foundations for subsequent evaluation of the Christian person being both made in the image of God and formed as a unity of apparently disparate components (variously described as body, soul, spirit, mind). With these established anthropological terms as the basis of the human person, Paul develops further existing Hellenistic ideas of conscience, the inner man and so on.
The Christ that is thus depicted is constituted in various unities; he inextricably combines the dual natures of divine and human. In turn, this holistic, uniquely dual-natured Christ forms part of another whole – the Holy Trinity – which is equally composed of indivisible component ‘parts’. The doctrinal discussions which affirmed Christ’s dual nature were barely embryonic whilst Paul was writing, and were forged on the anvil of Ecumenical debates from the third to fifth centuries. As Chapters 11 and 12 explain, the issue of the material body and how a perfect Christ could share in humanity’s corporeality was not only contentious but variously expressed through heterodox practices and beliefs many of which privileged ascetic behaviour.
Paul’s contribution to the anthropological and Christological debate is of immense importance, for various reasons. For a start, his theology is the rootstock for much Patristic and subsequent theological elaboration, whether it is acknowledged or not. The whole question of the human body and Christ’s salvation through being incarnate lies at the heart of Paul’s interpretation of Jesus’ message. Even today, much of our appreciation of Paul’s theology reflects Robinson’s claim that: ‘One could say without exaggeration that the concept of the body forms the keystone of Paul’s theology. In its closely interconnected meanings, the word σώμα (soma) knits together all his great themes.’1
Paul’s syncretistic heritage provides a rich mix of concepts and terminology. The insights of Hellenistic philosophy are clearly evident, alongside Hebraic thought, Rabbinic style and the mystery religions. Paul’s insistence that his status is not just a follower of Christ but an apostle adds further complexity to his appropriation of anthropological terms, since this claim assumes or confers a considerable degree of authority in his epistles. The later church’s response to this is expressed in part through awarding canonicity to Pauline texts. It is significant that the canon confirmed as most unambiguously Pauline in authorship those texts from the whole Pauline corpus which have most to say about the issue of human body and Christ’s physical self – for example, 1 and 2 Corinthians, and Romans. In other words, the canon of the Bible confirms a Pauline reading of the human person, just as it confirms the dual nature of Christ.
Modern scholarship on Paul: the place of Jewish anthropology
Twentieth-century thinking about the biblical presentation of the relationship between anthropology and Christology was much shaped by Bultmann. His assertion that in the Pauline epistles the theology is the anthropology has stood as a marker for his brand of existentialism and demythologising: it has also influenced scholars of Christianity who were further informed by rational, historical perspectives, and scientific evidence such as the findings of archaeologists.2 Post Bultmann, John Robinson’s study of Pauline anthropology from 1952 is still seen as ‘a paradigm’ in post-World War II understanding of how the Apostle made sense of humanity’s relationship to God in whose image it was made.3 The nineteenth century saw Paul as primarily influenced by Hellenistic thought, with the physical body seen as inherently evil and salvation represented by deliverance from the body. This is now firmly discredited as insufficiently acknowledging the influence of Jewish teaching on Paul’s thought.4 Robinson’s appraisal of Jewish terminology and assertion that Paul’s anthropology shows him to be ‘what he describes himself, a Hebrew of the Hebrews’,5 reminds us that in order to understand Paul we must first look at the Hebraic model, as well as its synthesis with Hellenistic ideas about the issue. Rabbinic writings contributed to Paul’s understanding, too. These are closely contemporaneous to his own writing, if we take Rabbinic Judaism to start with the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, and subsequent migration of Rabban Yahanan ben Zakkai and his students to Yavneh (Jamnia).6 Both these Jewish sources discuss the human person as created in God’s image, but, as with the New Testament texts, there is fluidity (and inconsistency) in how individual ‘technical’ terms – such as body, flesh, soul – are to be understood, since they can be used as synonyms, as synecdoche, or with discrete meanings.7 The basis of human anthropology in the Hebrew Scriptures is Gen. 1.26: humanity is made in the ‘image’ and ‘likeness’ of God, and thereafter makes choices for good or ill which affect its fate. Common to Christian and Rabbinic thought is the idea that the mere existentiality of human beings is mediated constantly by their autonomous decisions to give in to evil impulses (the Jewish/Rabbinic version) or live according to the flesh (the Pauline phrase).8 It is noticeable that the ‘evil impulses’ of the Hebraic concept show remarkable similarities to Evagrius’ doctrine of logismoi, spelled out in his Antirrheticos. Common to both the New Testament and the Hebrew Scriptures is a belief in the potential for human redemption from the thrall of evil, whether that is an abstract external agent or the result of poor choices made, freely, by people. For the Christian, the physicality of human nature acquires even greater significance, since physical resurrection whether of Christ or His followers entails a reconfiguring of the material body after death; one that predicates the acceptability of such materiality since ‘salvation is not deliverance from the body but resurrection of the body’.9
Post Bultmann, commentators have been keen to agree or even impose a monistic,10 dualistic, dual11 or tripartite structure on the human being. Whilst looking at the concept of ‘body’ the focus in this study will be on the human body as a physical and non-physical entity, the humanity shared by the incarnate Christ. Clearly much of the writing about bodies relates to the ‘cosmic body’,12 or the nature of the resurrected body (either in the Jewish or Christian tradition). Furthermore, the language of bodies also expresses ‘the body of the church’ and its evolution from the concept of the ‘body politic’ widely used in the ancient world.13 Recent discussions on the Bible’s presentation of ‘body’ images include gender discourse as a means to understand the person of Christ (it is suggested that Graeco-Roman male identity was a constructed acquisition, with maleness representing perfection and completion compared to the inadequacies of other forms such as women and slaves).14
Hebrew terminology
As noted above, the Jewish understanding of humanity starts with man being made in the image of God. Genesis describes human dominion over other created beings; the role of human citizens is thus expressed in the language of monarchy. So we can see ‘Adam’ as generically both female and male, in a ‘[democratisation of] an ancient Near Eastern royal use of image language; all human beings are created in the image of God, not just kings’.15 The alternative creation story in Gen. 2.7 begins to introduce a language of human anthropology, in showing life created from the dust of the earth, into which God breathed a living soul. Whilst seeing man as enlivened by a spirit or soul is clearly common to many traditions, the way the vocabulary explains this varies considerably. The Hebrews had no one word for the ‘body’.16 When the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek took place, this presented serious problems; in LXX the one Greek word sōma is used to translate eleven different Hebrew words, but none of them conveyed quite the same meaning as sōma.17 In places, specific body parts are used as synecdoche for the body; thus in Gen. 47.12, Joseph gives food to all in his father’s household ‘σ
τον κατὰ σ
μα’,18 but overall the Septuagint is unable to suggest that sōma can suggest the whole human person.19 Throughout the Old Testament we find at least four different words used to depict man in his entirety, three of which focus on attributes of men in contradistinction to those of their Creator.20 For Jews, humanity was comprised of heart, spirit, soul and body (Paul’s additional concern with mind, conscience and the inner/outer man seem to derive not from Hebraic but Hellenistic background).21 No single system existed for defining the human person, which is variously described as combinations of the four aspects noted above. According to Josephus, the Essenes saw the whole body as being composed simply of the unity of body and soul.22 Jewish thought conceived of humanity as ‘being’ not ‘having’ a body; this in itself militates against a consistent use of what he calls just one term for the human body.23
If we move from the body to ‘flesh’, similar issues arise. The Hebrew word bāsār (flesh) occurs much more frequently than any other word suggesting the totality of man; it appears 127 times in the Old Testament. Again, this does not easily translate into one Greek term, as bāsār means the stuff of which animals are made, especially when dead.24 In addition to meaning ‘man’, by extension it suggests kinship or may be used as a metonym for humans not in distinction to other animals (since humans share with all animals an essence which is perishable and mortal) but to God.25 Flesh is not portrayed as inherently evil, nor is it necessarily the source of concupiscence, but being mortal it is subject to decay, unlike God. ‘Flesh’ can simply denote the whole self, as in Ps. 63.2; ‘my whole flesh (being) thirsteth’.26 The LXX uses σάρξ to translate ‘flesh’ in, for example Gen. 6.3, and here it is contrasted to God’s Spirit; the connotations of mortality and inevitable corruption therefore predispose Paul to reading a life ‘according to the flesh’ as one deprived of God.27 Elsewhere, sōma is used to talk of the living slaves (who were effectively dead bodies) being cast into the Lion’s den.28
Turning to the Spirit, in the Old Testament God’s Spirit is not a personal being but a ‘principle of action’ belonging to Yahweh alone – so you can be filled with the Spirit (Ex. 31.3), the spirit can be poured out (Isa. 29.10, 44.3) and the Spirit can be taken from a person (Ps. 51.13).29 Clearly such a use of pneuma cannot be conflated with the sense of the human soul, as sometimes happens in the New Testament discussions of the human person.
Whilst terminology about the human persons in the Hebrew Scriptures is represented in its Greek (dis)guise in the LXX, the Rabbinic sources offer quite different insights into both the terms used and their interpretation. The Rabbinic term for body is gûp, which is used in Rabbinic discourse not so much to discuss the creation of man as outlined in Genesis, but to see the human body in relation to Yahweh or even angels; in other words, the concern is not about the ontological nature of man but his place in God’s creation. The physicality of the human person is shared with the physicality of animal existence,30 and a good deal of the rabbinic commentary on Gen. 9.6 and Gen. 1. 26–27 therefore focuses on the body as ‘porous’, as something which is involved in consumption and excretion of various sorts.31 Rabbinic sources also tend to distinguish between flesh and spirit.32
Significant cultural differences between Jewish, Rabbinic and Hellenistic attitudes to the body shape ascetic anxieties. For example, Josephus, Plutarch and Pausanias all provide evidence that, within Greek culture, it was commonplace for athletic activities to take place in the nude. The Hellenes cultivated appreciation of the young male body as a source of aesthetic delight, and a fine physical appearance facilitated youths who were seeking patronage. By contrast, Jewish culture regarded nudity as shameful.33 It represented degradation and poverty; note the care taken by Noah’s sons to cover his nakedness when he is drunk (Gen. 9.22–23) and the strong reaction by Jesus’ disciples, as Jewish men of their day, to his washing of their feet as taking on the demeaning task of a slave (John 13). It was even ‘unthinkable’ that someone of high status would demean themselves by putting on their own shoes,34 hence the importance of John the Baptist’s assertion that he foreran one whose sandals he was not worthy to unfasten (John 1.26).
Towards a Jewish version of asceticism
Whilst Christian asceticism focused on coming to terms with the body and ensuring its appropriate use, Jewish society was less focused on what the body did or did not do, and more interested in a pious existence. This was founded on the ‘righteous’ living separately from the ‘non-righteous’ as a demonstration of faithful belonging to the ‘remnant’ of Israel.35 The Hebrew term ‘perushim’ (‘separatists’) during the period of Rabbinic Judaism shows affinities to the attitudes of the Pharisees.36 The New Testament examples of friction between Christ (and His disciples) and the Pharisees frequently pivot around the question of whether or not people were living in obedience to the commandments as God’s chosen people. Erosion or rejection of the covenantal relationship was what was at stake in the conflicts between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ law of Christ, rather than how the body was actually being used. These different understandings of what constituted a godly life led to misunderstandings on both sides; some Christian exegetes misconstrued 3 Maccabees as describing lapsed Jews abandoning their food laws out of greed. This was particularly abhorrent to Patristic writers who saw in gluttony a selfish reluctance to share which was the antithesis of Christian teaching such as in 1 Tim. 4.3–4.37 Jewish attitudes to food, and especially their food laws, were open to misrepresentation as denoting a carnally minded approach to life, which was abhorrent to Christian ascetics.38 For Jews, fasting on the Day of Atonement was a corporate expression of obedience and community, rather than to do with proscriptive dietary laws. Moses led the chosen people to a shared way of life, in which Jewish identity was to be seen through ubiquitous customs which distinguished them from Gentiles. This was sufficient for him to be seen as ‘an ascetic philosopher-king’.39 So rabbinic ascetic practices can be described as ‘instrumental’ in comparison to the more ‘essential’ or ontological nature of Christian habits.40 It has also been suggested that rabbinic anthropology derived as much from Graeco-Roman ideas as Jewish ones,41 a point borne out by the overlapping material of the ‘Greek’ and ‘Jewish’ Esther novels discussed below. The influence of Hellenistic ideas can be readily seen in Paul, of course.
The Rabbinic tradition believed living a good life was determined by moral choice. It is from the Rabbinic writings that we learn that the human person (in its entirety) may be governed by good or evil impulses (ha-yětzer há-tôb and hâ-yêtzer hâ-râ),42 and thus open to sin and its avoidance. Being sinful is therefore not about the existence of the body but choosing how to use it, and these good and evil impulses affected not just the physical body but the spiritual side of man, too.43 This is clearly closer to Paul’s ‘living kata sarka’ than assuming humanity is doomed to fail because the body is inherently sinful and corrupt. Indeed, we can find an explicit connection between the concept of the ‘two impulses’ and the analysis of sin in Romans 7; sin becomes less an actual event, but rather a way in which people work when not guided by the best principles.44 So Paul adopts from this Rabbinic teaching a sense that man in his entirety operates not in accordance with intrinsic good or evil but through intentionality.45 Since making moral decisions involves not the physical but the intellectual side of man, clearly the human person must (in this setting) be a unified whole, with the body’s actions being governed by spiritual and rational thoughts and feelings.
Other Jewish sources for religious anthropology
Some of the Jewish novels which pre-date the Rabbinic tradition illustrate the essential neutrality of the physical body as a factor in human sinfulness. Dating from between 200 BCE and 100 CE, they were narratives which were designed as fictitious entertainments.46 As with the accounts of cross-dressing and transvestite pilgrims discussed in Chapter 5, the fact that these texts are fictitious does not detract from what they teach us about contemporary cultural ideas about the human person and how the body relates to human salvation. The story of Esther recounted in several of these texts shows the transformative potential of the body when reordered to please God. Like Luke’s ‘Sinful Woman’, Esther (a queen, not a woman of the town as in Luke’s parable) demonstrates how the body can be used in unexpected ways to communicate grief for sin, and to achieve salvation. Her body is not seen as inherently evil, and indeed is used to show the completeness of her remorse as something affecting her whole self:
Esther the queen turned to the Lord for refuge, gripped by the fear of impending death. She stripped herself of her rich garments and robed herself in clothes of mourning and tribulation, daubing her head with ashes and dung in place of her expensive perfumes. She debased herself, covering her entire body, which she had earlier adorned with such delight, with her fallen tresses. Then she called upon the Lord God of Israel.47
The penitential rewriting of the body’s sexual attractiveness in this text highlights the fact that before the emergence of Christian motifs of bodily purification, there was a growing awareness in Judaism of the potential for sin in connection with a sexualised body. Indeed, in the Lucan story of the Sinful Woman, it is Simon the Pharisee who raises the question of the inappropriateness of the presence of a woman who earned her living by her looks not by a decent use of her body. Jesus’ confirmation of her as the more blessed because the more repentant and the more loving of the two is the moral of the parable, but the story also shows significant tolerance of the body: as with Esther, it is all the physical aspects of the woman which were seen as beautiful and alluring which are employed in expressing her penitence. Esther renounces her quintessential femininity (as do Thecla and others) reconfiguring herself as in God’s image.48 Luke’s Sinful Woman transforms her whole being through a rightly oriented use of her body – the good impulse has overtaken the bad.
The Qumran texts provide a further alternative model for how the body and sense of self might be properly employed, whether this is cast as ‘asceticism’ or ‘separatism’. The Community Rule of Qumran introduces the idea of the Church as a living temple, and God’s people, the bodies, as his temple on earth; this image is used by Paul for example in 1 Cor. 3.16–17, 1 Cor. 6.19–20, 2 Cor. 6.16 and Rom. 8.29.49 Seeing the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, Paul places man in communion with God, who hallows the physical body in order that it may return honour to God. Although the use of ‘body’ as a sense of a gathered community is not our prime concern here, these passages are important for understanding the place of the body because how the body behaved and what lifestyle was adopted by believers distinguished true believers from others. A theoretical approach on these texts gives an alternative reading. Writing on pre-Christian Jewish ascetic discourse, Lawrence Wills argues that the ‘decentering of self’ (which is one modern view of what constitutes asceticism) is evident in Qumran texts.50 He acknowledges Foucault’s pivotal insights into Christian asceticism as a process of reforming the self in addition to the previous insistence on self-discipline; this becomes rearticulated as ‘decentering of the self’ in the work of Elizabeth Castelli.51 The ‘decentred self’ is also discovered in the Hodayot (thanksgiving psalms or spiritual exercises) from Qumran,52 which differ from the ‘centred’ self of the penitential psalms of the Hebrew Bible.53
Pauline anthropological vocabulary
Just as in Hebrew so in the Greek of the New Testament there are a range of terms used, in a flexible and unsystematic manner, to denote man in his entirety, and in the various parts which make up that humanity. Calculations by John Robinson, extended by Jewett, have provided extensive analysis of the terminology: from this we learn that in the New Testament sarx (flesh) is used 147 times and sōma (body) 142 times. Applied to the human person, sōma means the physical aspect of the person. Man as a body represents part of God’s creation, working in accordance with nature. This is in contrast to sarx which can convey the same sense of the entire human person, but standing in hostility to God’s purposes. Sarx offers the most complex range of usage. It does denote physicality but more than that, propensity to wayward living. It is found across didactic/exegetical texts (where the majority of instances occur), with parenetic and polemical being followed by apologetic as other occasions. Superficially the clear contrast between the two terms may suggest a polarity which offers the basis for first and second Adam typology; the imperfect prototype being perfected by the perfect new man. But, whilst the dichotomy between sarx and sōma may throw some light on the understanding of the human body, the bigger distinction is between sarx and pneuma, as representing man living under either the old order or the new, the earthly versus the heavenly existence. Pneuma confers the potential for life in God, a being into which God has breathed so that the spirit-filled man seeks conformity to God, through Christ. Whilst the body may be made partly of flesh, and is an essential part of its unity, as a concept sarx represents man in contrast, or opposition, to God. Sarx denotes mortality and the potential for corruption; it is not inherently corrupt but carries more of a sense of corruptibility than sōma, not least because ‘body’ also carries the diverse connotations of a community of faithful, the church of God and so on. So ‘flesh’ is opposed not to ‘body’ but to ‘spirit’: flesh is seen in Rom. 7.5, 14, 25 and 8.3–4, 7 as ‘an inadequate response to God’s righteous standard in the law’, while Rom. 8.2, 4 depicts the Spirit ‘[empowering] true righteousness, providing an internal rather than external law’. Flesh does not indicate body as opposed to soul, but what the whole person becomes when deprived of the ‘spirit’ which is God’s. Flesh is opposed to ‘mind’ in Rom. 7.25. The terms sarx, sōma, psychē and so on do not so much designate different parts of human beings, but rather specific aspects of the person, which relate to function. Different terms suggest different actions or activities; hence in 1 Peter 3.18, Christ’s ‘death in the body’ and being ‘made alive by the Spirit’ is not ‘a distinction between body and soul as found in Greek philosophy’ but refers instead to the dual nature of Christ, the ‘two spheres of Christ’s existence, His earthly life and His risen state transformed by the Spirit’; the vocabulary of human existence is used to describe the work of Christ.54
Paul sees the physicality of human bodies as inherently neutral; this is shown by the fact that it is especially when the words are qualified that they suggest morally or spiritually dubious qualities, as in Rom. 7.24: ‘who can liberate me from this body of death?’ The same is true of the ‘body of sin’ (Rom. 6.6) and the ‘mortal body’ (Rom. 8.11). At the same time, Paul does at times suggest a subordination of soul to body, such as Matt. 10.28 or Luke 12.4. But the two are ‘ontologically united’, and require the ‘new’ law and commandment to render man free from the stranglehold of the flesh. It is being under the old ‘law’ which condemns a Christian to living in the flesh; Jewett is not alone in seeing Rom. 7.5 as being the ‘decisive verse’ for interpreting sarx in Paul’s writings. It is intentionality which makes flesh dangerous; the Rabbinic living according to ‘evil impulses’ is reconfigured by Paul, as living kata sarka, connecting to ‘the forcefield opposed to the spirit of God’. Kata sarka is contrasted to living kata pneuma (Rom. 8.4f.) and kata kurion (2 Cor. 11.17) and kata agapen (Rom. 14.15).
As in Hebrew, synecdoche occur; the ‘whole person’ may be variously denoted by sōma or sarx or even some other word relating to bodily functions. For example, the phrase ‘flesh and blood’ can simply mean ‘person’ as in ‘I consulted no flesh and blood’ (Gal. 1.16, 13.1); this meaning is also found in Sir. 14.18, 17.26. Romans 12.1 invites people to ‘present your bodies’ (that is, offer yourselves) ‘as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God’. In Phil. 2.7 (‘made in the likeness of men’) Paul makes use of the Greek word anthrōpos for ‘man in his entirety.
Paul’s use of first and second Adam typology, as noted above, makes clear that the humanity of Christ, one of the two natures in which he exists, must be complete, with no substitution of any of the component parts that would be found in a human person. However, through his divine kenosis, Christ transforms human frailty into ‘a new humanity’ which is physical and spiritual. The second Adam is truly man, just as the first Adam was, but he is also and uniquely a spiritual man. Only through conformity with the first Adam can Christ act as ‘his representative, rather than as his substitute’ in the death on the cross. The crucifixion therefore marks out the sacrifice of Christ and the demand that man share in that sacrifice through metaphorical death of sin.55
Paul’s synthesis of sources for a theology of the human person
As we can see, Paul had at his disposal three different strands of thought about the human person: Graeco-Roman philosophical ideas; Jewish teachings as enshrined in the Hebrew scriptures and Rabbinic practices. The dominance in Paul’s thought of Semitic over Graeco-Roman thought is now well established, and is amply demonstrated by the way in which Paul talks about the human person as an integrity of spiritual and material aspects. The Platonic model of the human person asserts the desirability of spiritual elevation through a process of the soul or mind transcending its bodily limitations, suggesting a denigration of the corporeal nature of man. The rabbinic idea of how to become a perfected man, however, focuses on maintaining appropriate purity and sanctifying everyday life whilst remaining firmly within the body which Yahweh made.56 Certainly both Jewish and Pagan cultures see the right use of the body, rather than its rejection, as the key to salvation.57 But the two cultures express this in ways which place the physical body in a different position, explained at one level by the distinction that: ‘the Greeks thought of an incarnate spirit and the Israelites thought of an animated body’.58 The Jewish understanding of ‘Adam’ is as not just first man, but typical man, given a body by God for a practical purpose, rather than being the punishment of a wayward soul.59 In the Psalms, the creation of man is referred to as the emanation of Yahweh, hence Ps. 8.3: ‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ Whereas the Greeks saw humankind as in relation to abstract forms, the Jewish view was rooted in Yahweh’s purpose in creating man in his own image. Paul can thus be described as having ‘looked to God first and then considered man as he stood in that divine light’.60 Because Paul starts by accepting man’s creation by God, and only secondarily questions what the nature of that personhood might be, extremes of both anthropological and metaphysical dualism are avoided, and unity of the whole person preserved. If God in creating man’s body and soul ‘saw that it was very good’ (Gen. 1. 31), then neither body nor soul (if they can be detached from each other) could be intrinsically evil.61 The Graeco-Roman opposition between form and matter bears little resemblance to the Jewish view of the human person.62
Paul’s ideas about the nature of the resurrected body also suggest a certain distancing from Graeco-Roman ideas. Although there is much debate about whether human resurrection will be physical or not, Paul’s insistence in 1 Cor. 15 on Christ’s resurrection as the entire point of the message of salvation relies, according to some commentators, on a reading of ‘body’ as a physical entity.63 Likewise Rom. 8.11 insists that Christ’s sharing in humanity means that the Resurrection will revivify human flesh. To suggest that Christ’s Resurrection was not physical would raise fundamental Christological doubts; if Christ was not raised physically in what sense did He have a fully human body? 1 Cor. 15 claims that if there is no Resurrection, then faith is empty; the first and second Adam typology here is an emphatic means of insisting that Christ’s life and death reflect human existence (vv. 21–22) and redeems it in its physicality. The typology here not only asserts the Deuteronomic description of the creation of man as the first Adam, it distances that view from Roman society.64 That Paul’s view of this is material not entirely spiritual is insisted on by Peter Brown, whose comment that he ‘lived his life poised between revelation and resurrection’ responds to the fundamentally physical nature of Paul’s conversion experience; he ‘aches’ for the world to come, for the life which will complete the process of transformation from Saul to Paul.65 His personal experience of conversion, with its dramatic physical manifestations, mimics the complete transformation of resurrection as an apocalyptic event in which the opposites of earthly and heavenly will be gathered together and reconciled.66 The physicality of the human body with all its senses is the means by which Christ’s earthly life can be read and understood.67 Within Pauline, and subsequently Patristic doctrine, flesh cannot be seen as intrinsically sinful without rendering the doctrine of the Fall, the Incarnation and perhaps even the Resurrection meaningless. It was in the flesh that the first Adam disobeyed God and introduced sin into the world. However, it was also in the flesh that Christ descended to earth to redeem humanity. Seeing flesh as automatically sinful would limit the Incarnation to a docetic gesture. Emphasising that spirit, soul and body are all to be preserved to the parousia, Paul affirms the ‘inclusiveness of the conception’ of man who is to be redeemed.68 However, this needs to be set against 1 Cor. 15.50, where Paul asserts that ‘flesh and blood’ cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven.
Notwithstanding a degree of alienation from Roman values Paul, a Jew living in the diaspora, boasts of the Roman citizenship he held, and therefore some instances of the word ‘body’ in his writings relate to his dual citizenship.69 In such places as 1 Cor. 12.12–31 ‘body’ is not a religious anthropological term but a metaphor for the life of Christian communities. The human body with its co-dependent and collaborative components is a successful metaphor for a social economy, but works only if it relates to an integration of component parts.70 In talking of Christian communities as a ‘body’ Paul, living between the Stoics and the early Christian martyrs and ascetics, shows his ability to be all things to all people (1 Cor. 9.20–23).71 This flexibility of approach also means that whilst writing to the citizens of Rome (Rom. 7 and 8) of the importance of living kata sarka and en sarki he expresses some fundamentally Jewish ideas, echoing the ‘good and evil impulses’ of his Rabbinic background, whilst aiming to communicate with a Hellenistic readership.72 The rich mix of concepts and cultural references in the Pauline Epistles, as well as their canonical status, provided the evolving Christian ascetic tradition with a plethora of metaphors, ideas and understandings about the human person, and the paradoxical combination within man of material and non-material. As we will see, the desert Fathers mined the Pauline quarry for Christian teachings and the heritage of biblical views of the place of the body in a godly life. At the same time, they sought their own ways to live out their earthly existence within the confines of their bodies and the temptations those provided; in so doing, they evolved new terms and concepts for how to combine material existence with ascetic endeavour.