Okay, I'm Basically with Peter van Inwagen and the others on this, and I've written on this, there's an article which I have in one of the volumes of my collected essays about this. The word soul, as you say in Hebrew, is nephesh. But nephesh doesn't mean what in the great Platonic tradition, which came through into the Christian tradition in the third century with Origen and so on, what they mean by psuke, which is the soul in the sense of a non material, non physical element of the human makeup. I mean, use the word element loosely there. But the soul, for a Platonist, is that which connects us to the divine, to the forms, to the ultimate reality, which is different from the physical reality of this world. And the extraordinary thing is that ever since the Bible got translated into English, where nephesh was translated as soul, people have read those passages of the Old Testament as soul, quite simply. So say in Psalms 42 and 43, where you have the refrain, why are you so vexed, oh my soul, why are you so disquieted within me? John Goldingay's translation, which actually takes very seriously the fact that nefesh means, means life. It's what you have in a human being or an animal as well. When God has breathed his breath into you, you have life. So why are you so vexed, oh my deepest life within me? It's not a Platonic soul. It's a sense of the interiority of the human being as part of the God givenness of that human's makeup. And then in the New Testament, again, we've read all sorts of passages like in Mark 8, and parallels the danger of gaining the whole world and losing your soul, your psuche. But the psuche is not the soul, as in the Platonic sense, it is the life. When God says to the foolish rich man, you fool, this night your psuche will be demanded of you, means you're going to die. And it doesn't mean you've got this thing called soul which is going to be taken out of your body. We have real difficulty with this because it's so deeply in our culture. But I have to say to people again and again, just as the New Testament Testament never uses the word heaven to describe or denote the ultimate destiny of human beings, so the New Testament hardly ever uses the word psuche, soul, if you want to translate it like that, to denote the sort of creatures that we are in the interim between bodily death and bodily resurrection, the closest you'd get is those odd passages in Revelation 6. And Revelation 20, where the souls under the altar are saying, how long, O Lord, how long? And it seems to me that's a general way of saying that God looks after people after their death, but they are still the ones who have died, particularly the martyrs. They are not in a place either of fear or torment, or yet in the final place of the New Jerusalem, they are waiting for God's new creation to be launched. So that then when we say, well, so what's going on? How do we do this business of describing a human being between bodily death and bodily resurrection? The New Testaments are answer to that is with the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit who indwells you in the present will maintain you in the nearer presence of Christ. Paul says, my desire is to depart and be with the Messiah, which is far better. That I believe happens because as in First Corinthians, Paul says that the Spirit becomes one with our Spirit, or if you like, the one who belongs to the Messiah becomes one spirit with him. It's an extraordinary thing. Our Spirit bears witness with God's spirit and vice versa. And that conjoined human spirit and divine spirit, then the Spirit isn't going to say at our bodily death, oh well, that was interesting for a while. Goodbye, see you sometime. Like when I raise you from the dead, I believe that that's the Trinitarian way of talking about what in Platonic thought is expressed through this idea of the soul going up to heaven and so on and so forth. So you can have a thoroughly physical view of what it means to be human. And that includes the emot, the feelings, the imagination, all the things that make up our human interiority. But when we invoke and invite the Holy Spirit to come and dwell within us and to shape us, then the work that the Holy Spirit does in reorientating our wills, our desires, our imaginations, our hopes, fears, et cetera, that I believe will then be hung onto, as it were, by the Holy Spirit in the nearer presence of Christ until the day when that same Spirit raises us from the dead. So this is not a dualism in the usual Platonic sense of body, soul. And it's interesting, you can see Jewish thinkers wrestling with this, the song that we call the Song of the Three Holy Children or the Benedicity. All ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord. The last line in that, or nearly the last line is, you spirits and souls of the righteous. As though somebody in probably the 2nd century BC is aware that the righteous, particularly the martyrs, they are still around. They still need to praise the Lord. They're not quite sure what word to use for them, spirits or souls. But in the passage in Acts 23 where the Pharisees believe that maybe Paul has seen somebody who recently died, but they don't believe that this person was actually raised from the dead, they say, what if an angel or a spirit spoke to him? So they have this language of angel or spirit. They don't use the language of soul. And I think the sooner we realize that the language of soul, the way the whole Western Christian tradition has used it, comes from Plato and not from the Bible, the better off we will be.
Mike Bird (9:11)
Yeah. I mean, even Justin Martyr in the second century can complain about Christians who believe in the immortality of the soul rather than the resurrection of the body. And that you get the view, particularly from Plato, that the soul is trapped inside the body and is desperately trying to. Trying to get out. And I think we have been. I think that's just remained with us for so long and is with people when they. When they read the Bible about. About various things, it's hard to get around that, but it's. It is an interesting topic because there are these very peculiar passages, like 2 Corinthians 5, where Paul's talking about tents and bodies, and I don't want to be found naked. I don't want to be found naked. That's usually weird dreams I have when, you know, I'm walking through public and then realize I'm not properly. Yeah. I mean, and then you've got, you know, Paul saying in Philippians, you know, he's happy to be with. Cry when he can, Happy to die, be with Christ, which is better by far. I mean, there are those passages, and like I said, the ones in Revelation about the souls of the martyrs at the altar saying, how long, O Lord? You know, it is a bit of a mystery. And I do like Joel Green, he kind of opts for a bit of a mysterious option or like a sense of mystery. He says, look, what we can say confidently, to use the language of Colossians, is that after death, our life, not our soul, our life is hidden in Christ.
N.T. Wright (11:57)
Yeah, I quite agree. Of course, there is a simple word for what you just described and it's Gnosticism. That was precisely what the Gnostics were saying in the second century, that this body is a piece of rubbish and trash and we've got to get rid of it, because there is this true spark of life within me which is who I really am. It's the kind of ugly duckling syndrome. I remember when I saw the movie erin Brockovich about 20 or 30 years ago, realizing that expresses a form of Gnosticism, this person who nobody had any time for them and they internalized that sense of, oh dear, I'm worthless, I'm nothing, I'm nobody. But then there is this, this real life inside which has to come out and finally it comes out and that's the wonderful thing. And as Harold Bloom said, Gnosticism is the default mode of American religion, particularly discovering who I really am. And that has emerged now, as you say, with the whole identity thing. I mean, my friend, and perhaps yours, Simon Gavicole in Cambridge, he did a project on this. He did a project on this a while back where he did an electronic library search in Cambridge for books with the word identity in their title. And up until the 1990s there weren't that many. And then suddenly in the 1990s it spiked and has continued high. It's as though, exactly as you say, culturally, the secular materialism has grown in on itself to the point where it's who are we actually? Oh, well, maybe I have a hidden identity which I didn't realize, and how exciting. And this gives me meaning and purpose and so on. And actually it's a delusion that this is why there's been real danger in Christ losing sight of the biblical doctrine of creation, of the goodness of creation and the fact of recreation through resurrection. And it's no surprise that the same cultural movement that has produced this Gnosticism doesn't have any space for bodily resurrection. So ever since the 18th century, people have sneered and said, oh, bodily resurrection, we know that doesn't happen. Well, excuse me, they knew in the first century that that doesn't happen. But the whole point of Jesus resurrection is this is the Creator God reaffirming the goodness of his creation in the person of His Son and thereby launching this new creation and inviting people to come and share it and be part of the project. And within that, then the people that we really are, we are designed to become whole, complete, entire, integrated human beings instead of seeking an identity which is other than our outward material circumstances. Of course I can understand if people are being persecuted, if people are being beaten up by political or military enemies, whatever, then the thought that maybe I have a secret identity somewhere when I've got to cling onto that, that's very attractive, I understand that. But that doesn't help us with understanding what the Bible says about what human beings really are.
N.T. Wright (17:43)
Yeah, I've come and gone on this over the years, and as you and I were saying beforehand, you very seldom hear sermons on the genealogies of Jesus. It's not exactly a stirring stuff for a Sunday morning in the pulpit. I did once preach on the Matthean genealogy and trying to make out that if you skip over that, then you're missing out on what Matthew is saying right up front about the story of Jesus. And certainly when I was a young Christian thinking it's my duty and privilege to read the New Testament, well, I read Matthew Chapter one and I remember thinking, well, the sooner we get through this stuff, the better. And now I kind of repent of that because it's clear what Matthew is doing, which is saying Jesus is the true descendant of Abraham and David. And for years I used to be puzzled about why Matthew divides the genealogy not just with Abraham and David, but with the exile. And then one day I read in a book on the Dead Sea Scrolls about how most Judeans in the time after the Babylonian exile but before the time of Jesus, most of them didn't actually think the real exile was over yet. And they were waiting for the great new work that God was going to do, that God promised in all the great prophets about God himself coming back, about Israel being finally free, about justice and peace flooding the whole creation, et cetera, et cetera. They were waiting for that. So these are markers and Matthew has marked it in terms of 14 generations. 14 is, of course, two sevens. So you've got six sevens. Now, to anyone schooled in Judean numerology, if you like, then the idea of the seventh seven is, oh, my goodness. This has echoes of the jubilee principle from the book of Leviticus. This is the great coming time. It also has echoes particularly of Daniel, chapter nine, where the angel says to Daniel that the exile will actually last for not just 70 years, as Jeremiah had said, but 70 times seven. So it's playing with these sevens. There's a sense that anyone with their biblical wits about them, reading Matthew's genealogy, would say, oh my goodness, here is Jesus. This is the beginning of the seventh seven. This is where the story of Israel was always supposed to go. So it seems to be pretty clear that's what Matthew's doing. And it's hard to tell because we don't have lots and lots and lots of comparative material from the Old Testament period to say, was there actually another genealogy, another generation or two in there or before the exile or after the exile? Who are half of these people? This is the only time that half of them are mentioned. So we don't know. But Matthew at least is preparing the way for Jesus like that. Luke does something completely different. We'll come back to the difference of names in a minute, but Luke is taking the genealogy all the way back to Adam and then to God, which is an extraordinary thing because Luke knows as well as we do that seeing God as the father of Adam is not the same sort of thing as seeing Adam as the father of Cain and Abel and Seth, et cetera. So Luke just seems to be highlighting Jesus as the son of God and saying, well, there it is, it goes all the way back. And that's, I think, part of Luke's overall theology of who is Jesus, really? And from every point of view, he's saying Jesus is the son, not just of David and Abraham, but ultimately the son of God. But then there's the question of the different names. I used to be puzzled about this until, and Mike, you, as an antipodean may appreciate this, until I was in New Zealand for the first time, which was many years ago now, in the mid-90s sometime. And I was listening to the stories from the Maori about the old Maori stories about the original Maori settlers who came to New Zealand from other islands in the South Pacific. And I think, if I remember rightly, there were six large canoes of settlers that came to New Zealand. And to this day, a well educated Maori will be able to tell you which of those canoes their ancestor came in, and they've got the full ancestral history all the way down. But of course, there weren't that many of them, and there were many intermarriages of cousins and second cousins and so on. So that anyone in New Zealand who's from that ancestry can probably give you three or four or five different genealogies. As the genealogies twisted and turned this way and that. And in fact, to bring it all down home to my own family after my parents married, they discovered some while later that they were, in fact, I think it was sixth cousins once removed. They neither of them had known that my father's father's family and my mother's mother's family had all been farmers in the Cumberland area of northwest England. And they had these huge families of sort of a dozen or 15 children. And at one point a brother here had married a sister there. And then the genealogies had gone on their different ways. And then without knowing that they were very distantly related, my parents met through quite other reasons in a different part of the country. And then in doing the genealogical research, which was, I think, part of my father's post war therapy, he discovered there they were, they were actually very distantly related. So I am my own probably seventh cousin once removed. So in other words, we've probably all of us, especially in traditional societies, got all sorts of different ways of telling our genealogy. And so it's no surprise that the things diverge and you can get to Jesus this way or you can get to Jesus that way. What it of course says is, among many other things, that neither Matthew nor Luke is just copying the other one blindly because they might have been embarrassed to discover this. They just know these different traditions, and so this is what they are doing with them. And for Matthew, it's Jesus as the fulfillment of the story of Israel. For Luke, it's Jesus as the true Adam, both as the son of God and as the ultimate human being. And I think that's the main point to glean from from those two genealogies. But as I say, it's quite possible that you could have told half a dozen different genealogies of Jesus and they might all have been basically accurate, even if there are one or two steps missed out. So I think if anyone is worried about that and says, oh my goodness, there's a contradiction, I would say lighten up, that's not the point. That's not what's going on here.
Mike Bird (24:17)
Yeah. And I think that's the anxiety that people have they think it's like, you know, we've gone through ancestry.com for Jesus, Jesus. And these things do not line up. They're obviously the Bible is false, it's not true, it's a whole fabrication. I think people are coming with those sorts of questions, which are the wrong questions. Many years ago, in fact, my first doctoral student, wonderful guy called Jason Hood, he's now a pastor in Tennessee. He did his PhD on the Mathian genealogy. And I thought I was going to be, you know, bored just listen, listening to, you know, endless names and who's the difference between Jehoya Kim and Jehoyah kin and stuff like that. But he actually made it very, very interesting. And he looked at the function of genealogies in the Old Testament, you know, places like Ezra, Nehemiah, like, how do you know who is a real legitimate priest, you know, from what line they've come from? And he point out that genealogies are meant to be summaries of Israel's story and your connection to it. Okay, so that's why Matthew and Luke in different ways are trying to use the genealogies to do something of Israel story. And Matthew does it, showing Jesus is a son of Abraham, a son of David. He's really the Messiah in the context of, you know, before and after exile. He also includes those four interesting women who are kind of outsiders, who they're all associated with some sort of sexual impropriety, whether that's Rahab or Tamar, you know, something usually bad has happened to all these women or they're Gentiles. So he's trying to sort of, you know, foreshadow things in the story as well, which is a bit to, compared to what Luke is doing as well. And I think when you come to it that way, rather than looking at through the lens of is this the errant word of God and they've got the correct genealogy or the birth certificates all the way back to Adam. Adam. I think that's, that's not quite the point. And, and the other thing, it's, you know, you know, whether you say, well, one is from Joseph, one is from Mary, at the end of the day, you know, Jesus was, is not born of Joseph anyway, so he's kind of grafted into the Davidic line or into a Davidic family. So it can become a little bit moot. But yeah, I do think people are coming to it with the wrong question rather than looking at how these genealogies are summaries of Israel's story, which a person is then somehow connected to.
N.T. Wright (26:43)
Right. That's absolutely right. And indeed the way you've lined that up, which I thoroughly agree with. And obviously those women are, as it were, preparing you for the fact that there was something very odd about Jesus conception and birth, which is what Matthew gets to at that point. But also it makes me realize that so many questions that people have today, people who are devout Bible readers, who want to make sense of it and want to understand what God is in Scripture. Many of us, as I came myself, come from contexts where you're told the Bible is the word of God, you've just got to believe it. But then there's a skeptical world out there which says, no, no, no, the Bible can't be the word of God. It's a pack of lies, it's leading you astray. And basically we're in danger of fighting the battles of the 18th century all over again. And I met that when I was a student with people going forward in Matthew as far as Matthew chapter two, where the holy family are down in Egypt, and then they come back to the holy land and Matthew says that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by the prophet saying, out of Egypt I called my son. And people say, oh, silly old Matthew, didn't he realize that wasn't a prophecy of Jesus, that was about Israel? And actually, silly old rationalist critic didn't realize that Matthew knows that perfectly well. And what he's saying is Jesus is the fulfillment of God's purposes for Israel and he's recapitulating the whole story of Israel, which is a much richer than saying, oh, either did it happen this way or has Matthew just made it up? So I think again and again, the problems that people have, we need to encourage folk to lighten up and say, these problems come to me from a very particular cultural context and we need to step right back from that. And as I've said in other contexts, the facts are kind. History is our friend. When you look at what's really going ON in the first century, those 18th century questions really are trivial and irrelevant and we need to get way beyond them, as you've helpfully done.
Mike Bird (28:41)
Yeah. It just goes to show that a lot of the things that we regard as problematic and a lot of the things that people can be confused and anxious about is because we're coming from our own historical and cultural position and we're problematizing things that would never have occurred to the evangelists or the apostles, you know, you know, kind of. Did you not know about this? And they go well, yeah, like you said, of course I knew, but that's not, not the point. Well, for any, for anyone out there listening to this, if you've got any questions along those lines where you think there's a problem, but is the problem with me, or is there some sort of tension in the text, if there's something that's bugging you or you've always wondered about, I invite you to go to askantyright.com and ask us the question. Because if you've got a question that's bugging you, I'm pretty sure there's dozens, probably hundreds of other people who may have that niggling little thought that's been pestering them all this time. We would love to hear from you on it. But anyway, I think that's all the time we have for this week. Tom, it's a pleasure to be with you. Let me say, bless your soul, whether that's but not in the platonic sense. Bless your soul in the biblical sense, and bless all the souls of our listeners and our audiences, wherever they are. We're so glad that you're chiming in, and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Ask NT Write Anything podcast. Until then, take care. You've been listening to the Ask NT Write Anything podcast podcast. Let other people know about this show by rating and reviewing it in your podcast provider.
