The Israelites or Jews up to the time of Christ were not by any
means a spiritual nation. They had a god of the flesh; a sort of
cannibal god; a politico-religious god, in whose name every kind
of horror and brutality was committed. This was not Paul's God. The
garb of Socratic and Platonic philosophy adorns the spiritual phase
of Paul's idea. The dual existence is distinctly set forth (Cor. xv,
44): "There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body." "For
the spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the
children of God" (Rom. viii, 16). "Likewise the spirit helpeth our
infirmities" (26). "For if ye live after the flesh ye shall die"
(13). "For as many as are led by the spirit of God, they are the sons
of God" (14). The notion of Paul throughout his epistles of what he
terms flesh and spirit, separating them as two distinct parts of the
body, and as having a dual existence, on one side the spiritual, the
godly, on the other the fleshy, the sinful, the earthly--is due to the
educational doctrines that then were in vogue. The anatomical knowledge
was limited, and the physiological workings of the nervous system, the
functions of the brain, were entirely unknown. The flesh and spirit
were the representatives of the muscular and nervous tissue, flesh
of the muscular, spirit of the nervous. One of the most mysterious
or hidden secrets was this function of the brain. The absence of any
positive knowledge of the nervous system until recent times, caused
many errors to creep in, and many false impressions were received by
mistake; and these blunders through ignorance have remained to a very
considerable extent fixed and unaltered.
Grecian philosophers who were attempting to give a reason, or account,
for the various mental phenomena, came to conclusions which are to-day
seen to be contrary to scientific truth. He, Paul, embodied in his
writings all the speculative philosophy known at his time. This dual
existence had been taught among the Greeks for several centuries. When
Paul wrote to the Romans he was in Corinth, and when he wrote to the
Corinthians he was at Philippi, Macedonia. The rest of his epistles
were written partly from Greece, but mostly from Rome or Italy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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