Pegg, I'm sorry but your arguments don’t really carry any weight. The terms you use to dismiss these verses are basically the same terms I could use to dismiss all of your verses. They are all poetic, phrophetic or, as Paul (the contributor, not the Apostle) pointed out, concerning the body. You cannot get around the fact thast Jesus said to the thief before the sun has set today. I’m going to finish with Jesus’ own words - Matthew 22:32.
Ok, thats fair enough. So i guess then we need to go back to the original writings to see what the writers wrote. I have already posted much information about what the hebrew and greek words mean but perhaps if these meanings are still not satisfactory you might be intersted to know what christian scholars say about the original words or what the jews say about them.
Its been known for a very long time that the english meaning of soul is not the same as what the bible writers meant. The idea that later christians (3-4th century) adopted came from pagan greek philiosphers.
Plato wrote about the soul in one of his works and quoted Socrates as saying “The soul, . . . if it departs pure, dragging with it nothing of the body, . . . goes away into that which is like itself, into the invisible, divine, immortal, and wise, and when it arrives there it is happy, freed from error and folly and fear . . . and all the other human ills, and . . . lives in truth through all after time with the gods.”
The egyptions & Babylonians held similar views and that is why they buried their dead with food and material goods becasue they thought they needed them for the afterlife. The greeks buried their dead with money to pay the ferryman who took them into the afterlife.
But the jews in Jesus day did not believe such ideas...they knew what the words of their language meant and Nephesh did not mean a separate part of mans physical body, it means the living person.
The Jewish Publication Society of America in an article to the The New York Times, October 12, 1962. wrote: “the Hebrew word in question here is ‘Nefesh.’ Other translators have interpreted it to mean ‘soul,’ which is completely inaccurate. The Bible does not say we have a soul. ‘Nefesh’ is the person himself, his need for food, the very blood in his veins, his being.”
The catholic church admit this fact even though they are the ones who allowed the idea of the immortal soul into the church in the first place.
The New Catholic Encyclopedia 1967, Vol. XIII, p. 467 says: “Nepes [ne′phesh] is a term of far greater extension than our ‘soul,’ signifying life (Ex 21.23; Dt 19.21) and its various vital manifestations: breathing (Gn 35.18; Jb 41.13[21]), blood [Gn 9.4; Dt 12.23; Ps 140(141).8], desire (2 Sm 3.21; Prv 23.2).
The soul in the O[ld] T[estament] means
not a part of man, but the whole man—man as a living being. Similarly, in the N[ew] T[estament] it signifies human life: the life of an individual, conscious subject (Mt 2.20; 6.25; Lk 12.22-23; 14.26; Jn 10.11, 15, 17; 13.37).”
The New American Bible, in its “Glossary of Biblical Theology Terms” (pp. 27, 28), says: “In the New Testament, to ‘save one’s soul’ (Mk 8:35) does not mean to save some ‘spiritual’ part of man, as opposed to his ‘body’ (in the Platonic sense) but the whole person with emphasis on the fact that the person is living, desiring, loving and willing, etc., in addition to being concrete and physical.”
