The Bible and Immortality of the Soul

[Vouthon]

Contrary to the claims of some, Sacred Scripture does teach the survival of the soul after bodily death.

The book of Wisdom 8:19-20, in the Catholic Old Testament, states: “As a child I was by nature well endowed, and a good soul fell to my lot; or rather, being good, I entered an undefiled body.” Here the soul is explicitly identified with the I of awareness, conscious experience and first person perspective. Likewise, Wisdom 9:15 establishes that the soul and mind are the exact same entity: "for a perishable body weighs down the soul, and this earthly tent burdens the thoughtful mind.”

In his second letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul uses the nearly identical image of an earthly body weighing down a soul identified with the “we/I” inhabiting the body:

“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden . . . .” (2 Corinthians 5:1, 4.)

Paul identifies the “we” that inhabits the body with the “inner person” or separable soul; Wisdom likewise differentiates between the “I”, identified with the soul, and the body, which the “I/soul” enters and inhabits like a perishable “tent”. This is contrasted with "mortalism” which is emphatically rejected and decried out-of-hand in chapter 2 as symptomatic of the reasoning of the “ungodly”, and described as amounting to the following belief:

For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves,
“Short and sorrowful is our life,
and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end,
and no one has been known to return from Hades.
2 For we were born by mere chance,
and hereafter we shall be as though we had never been,
for the breath in our nostrils is smoke,
and reason is a spark kindled by the beating of our hearts;
3 when it is extinguished, the body will turn to ashes,
and the spirit will dissolve like empty air…

21 Thus they reasoned, but they were led astray (Wisdom 2:1-3; 21)

Like Josephus in his Antiquities, Acts refers to the Pharisees’ belief in disembodied spirits and angels, pared with the Sadducees rejection of these concepts. From Josephus, we learn that the Pharisees and their doctrines were “very influential among the body of the people”, something that the New Testament and the later Talmudic authors both attest to as well.

The prevalence of this theological presumption regarding the existence of disembodied human souls after death was such that the American scholar and Emeritus Professor of the Hebrew Bible, Lester L. Grabbe, could write: “It was a view of the soul similar but different to that in Platonism which became widespread in Judaism in the last century or so BCE” (Wisdom of Solomon p.54).

Basically, populist first century Judaism had inherited notions of an intermediate disembodied state in Hades and the resurrection of the dead from influential earlier texts (i.e. the Book of Daniel, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra etc.) This forms an important backdrop to the popular culture of the New Testament authors.

 

[Vouthon]

The Greek phrase translated as “earthy tent” in both Wisdom of Solomon and 2 Corinthians is not the normative word for tent (skene) but rather the highly unusual skenos which is found only twice in the New Testament (here and in v. 4) in this single passage, and only once in the LXX corpus in Wisdom of Solomon 9:15, where it is used figuratively to refer to the ensouled human body, leading one authority on the Apocrypha to conclude that Paul “had at sometime read this passage and [was] impressed by the Wisdom of Solomon.” Metzger, An Introduction to the Apocrypha at 158.

In this regard, Fredrik Lindgård argued in his very exegetically dense 2005 study entitled, Paul’s Line of Thought in 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:10 p. 140:

Skenos does not occur apart from 2 Cor. 5 in the New Testament. The LXX mentions the word once in Wisdom 9:15…It is possible that Paul’s language here is influenced by Wisdom’s dualistic terminology. It is obvious that, at least, there exists a similarity between, on the one hand, Phaedo 81c and Wisdom 9:15 and, on the other hand, between Wisdom 9:15 and 2 Cor 5:1-2

While David Edward Aune in his 2013 Jesus, Gospel Tradition and Paul in the. Context of Jewish and Greco-Roman. Antiquity. Collected Essays II p. 365 noted:

Wisdom 9:25 is a frequently cited parallel to 2 Corinthians 5:1…the italicized words in this quotation (“weighs down”/“earthly body”) indicate relatively close verbal parallels with 2 Corinthians 5:1-10 which suggests Paul’s familiarity with this Hellenistic Jewish mediation of Platonic tradition, if not with this passage itself

Paul was not, therefore, a “mortalist” or advocate of unconscious soul sleep in my opinion but rather a proponent of Hellenistic Jewish “body-soul” duality; just like the intertestamental Wisdom of Solomon, which he was so greatly influenced by, and this dualism was holistic in nature: ultimately looking forward to being “re-housed” in a heavenly, pneumatic body at the resurrection, as opposed to a perpetual disembodied “nakedness” in the Greek sense (as the Corinthians appeared to have wrongly understood it, thereby occasioning Paul’s explanation that this wasn’t a complete picture without bodily resurrection at the Eschaton).