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Bible Dictionaries
Body (2)
Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament
or BODY
i. The Human Body generally.—‘Body’ in the Gospels invariably represents σῶμα in the original. Always in Homer and frequently in Attic Greek σῶμα = a dead body; and in this sense the word is occasionally used in the Gospels (Matthew 27:52; Matthew 27:58-59 || Luke 17:37). The usual meaning, however, here as in the rest of the NT and in ordinary Greek usage, is the living body, and in particular the body of a living man (Matthew 6:22; Matthew 26:12, Mark 5:29). In the records of our Lord’s life, teaching, and whole revelation, we find the dignity and claims of the body as an integral part of human nature constantly recognized. This meets us in the very fact of the Incarnation (John 1:14), in the most solemn utterances of Jesus (Matthew 25:35; Matthew 25:42), in His tender regard for the bodily needs and pains of those around Him—His feeding of the hungry and healing of the sick; but above all in the narratives of His Resurrection and Ascension, which show that the Incarnation was not a temporary expedient of His earthly mission, but a permanent enfolding of our human nature, body as well as soul, within the essential life of the Godhead.
The Gospels give no support to the philosophic tendency, so often reflected in certain types of religious teaching, to treat the body with disparagement. Jesus accords full rights to the corporeal side of our being. He was neither an ascetic nor a preacher of asceticism—‘the Son of Man came eating and drinking’ (Matthew 11:18-19). At the same time, we find in His teaching a clear recognition of a duality in human nature—a distinction drawn between body and soul, flesh and spirit (Matthew 6:25; Matthew 26:41). Moreover, He lays strong emphasis on the antithesis between the body as the lower part of a man, and the soul as the higher. Though the body is a true part of our humanity, its value is not to be compared for a moment with that of the spiritual part (Matthew 10:28). Those who follow Jesus must be prepared, if need be, to surrender their bodies to the sword and the cross (Matthew 23:34); but ‘What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ (Matthew 16:26).
In the teaching of Jesus the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, which had gradually taken root in the Jewish mind, is everywhere presupposed (as in His references to the Future Judgment), and at times is expressly proclaimed (Luke 14:14; Luke 20:35, John 5:28-29). And by the grave of His friend Lazarus our Lord gave utterance to that profound saying, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ (John 11:25), which reveals the ultimate ground of Christian faith in the resurrection of the body, and at the same time invites us to find in the nature of the risen Christ Himself the type, as well as the pledge, of that new and higher corporeal life to which He is able to raise His people.
ii. The Body of Christ.
(1) Christ’s natural body.—As ‘the man Christ Jesus,’ our Lord was possessed of ‘a true body’ as well as of ‘a reasonable soul.’ When the time was come in the counsels of God for the redemption of mankind, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity took upon Him human flesh by the operation of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary (Matthew 1:18, cf. Galatians 4:4). In due time, according to the laws of human life, He was born at Bethlehem (Luke 2:5; Luke 2:7). The child thus born was seen in His infancy by the shepherds and the wise men, and, when He was eight days old, by Simeon and Anna (Luke 2:25; Luke 2:36). From His conception and birth His body developed in the manner usual to human beings. ‘The child grew,’ we are told (Luke 2:40); arrived at ‘twelve years old’; and still ‘increased in stature’ (Luke 2:42; Luke 2:52).
After He had arrived at man’s estate, we find Him living under the conditions to which the bodies of men in ordinary life are subject. We learn that He suffered hunger (Matthew 4:2); that He was wearied with journeying (John 4:6); that He experienced pain (Matthew 27:26); and that He underwent death (Matthew 27:50). In healing sickness He frequently used common bodily action, and His power of motion, with one miraculous exception (Matthew 14:25 ||), was limited to that which men in general possess. After death, His body, nowise different from that of an ordinary man, was delivered by Pilate to Joseph of Arimathaea, who wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb (Matthew 27:58 f.), where it rested till the moment of the Resurrection. Down to that moment, then, the Lord’s body had been a human body with the powers, qualities, and capacities of the body of an ordinary man.
(2) Christ’s body after the Resurrection.—It was the same body as before His death. The grave was left empty, because the very body which Joseph of Arimathaea laid there had risen and departed. Moreover, it had in most respects the same appearance. His disciples might doubt and hesitate at first (Luke 24:16; Luke 24:37, John 20:14), but they did not fail to recognize Him (Luke 24:31; Luke 24:52, John 20:16; John 20:20; John 20:28; John 21:7; John 21:12, Acts 1:3; Acts 2:32). We find Him eating and drinking as a man (Luke 24:42), making use of the natural process of breathing (John 20:22), declaring to His disciples that He had flesh and bones (Luke 24:39), showing them His hands and His feet (Luke 24:40), and giving them the assurance that His body was the identical body which they had seen stretched upon the cross, by inviting the disciple who doubted, to put his finger into the print of the nails and thrust his hand into the wound in His side (John 20:27).
On the other hand, our Lord’s resurrection body was freed from previous material conditions and possessed of altogether new capacities. It seems to be implied that it could pass at will through material objects (John 20:26); and it does not appear to have been subject as before to the laws of movement (Luke 24:36), or visibility (Luke 24:31), or gravitation (Mark 16:19, Luke 24:51). These new powers constituted the difference between His pre-resurrection and His glorified body. It was in His glorified body, thus differentiated, that He ascended into heaven; and in that same glorified body He is to be expected at His final coming (Acts 1:9; Acts 1:11).
There is little ground for the idea of Olshausen (Gospels and Acts, iv. 259–260) and others, revived by Dr. Newman Smyth (Old Faiths in New Light, ch. viii.), that the transformation of Christ’s body from the natural to the glorified condition was a process which went on gradually during the Forty Days, and was not completed till the Ascension. Rather, it must be said that on the very day of His Resurrection the spirituality of His risen body was as clearly shown as in the case of that much later manifestation by the Sea of Tiberias (cf. Luke 24:31; Luke 24:36, John 21:4 ff.). We are not to think of the body of Jesus during this period as in a transition state with regard to its substance—partly of earth and partly of heaven. It was with a spiritual body that He rose, that glorified body of which His Transfiguration had been both a prophecy and a foretaste; and if we see Him moving for a time along the borders of two worlds, that was because, for the sake of His disciples and the future Church, He made use of the natural in order to the revelation of the spiritual. It is in this way that we must explain His asking and receiving food (Luke 24:41 ff., Acts 10:41). He cannot have depended upon this food for His bodily support. His purpose in taking it was to convince His disciples that He was still a living man, in body as well as in spirit,—that same Jesus who had so often in past days partaken with them of their simple meals.
In respect of His body the risen Jesus now belonged to the mysterious regions of the invisible world, and it was only when He chose to reveal Himself that His disciples were aware of His presence. It is to be noticed that St. John describes His appearances as ‘manifestations’: He ‘manifested Himself,’ ‘was manifested,’ to the disciples (John 21:1; John 21:14). His resurrection body was a spiritual body, but it had the power of materializing itself to the natural senses, and Jesus made use of this power from time to time in order to convince His disciples, by the actual evidence of sight and sound and touch, that the victory of His whole human personality over death and the grave was real and complete. And when this work was accomplished, He parted from them for the last time, and went up to the right hand of the Father in a kind of royal state which not only proclaimed His own lordship over both worlds, but became a prophecy of the truth regarding the divinely appointed destiny of those whom He is not ashamed to call His brethren. In the body of Christ’s glory both St. Paul and St. John find the type after which the believer’s body of humiliation is to be fashioned at last (Philippians 3:21, 1 John 3:2). We are to be like our Lord in the possession of a human nature in which the corporeal has been so fully interpenetrated by the spiritual that the natural body has been transformed into a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:42-49).
There is no ground to suppose that our Lord’s entrance upon the state of exaltation implies any further change in His bodily nature. Certainly no new quality could be developed which would be inconsistent with the essential characteristics of a body. One of these characteristics is the impossibility of being in two places at the same moment. As long as He was on earth His body could not be in heaven, though He was there by His Spirit; and as long as He is in heaven His body cannot be on earth, although He is present by His Spirit, according to His promise to be with His followers where they are gathered together in His name (Matthew 18:20; cf. Matthew 28:20). St. Peter preached that the heavens must receive Him until the times of restoration of all things (Acts 3:21); and Christ Himself taught the Apostles that it was expedient for them that in bodily form He should leave them, so that the Comforter might take His place in the midst of the Church (John 16:7).
(3) Christ’s mystical body.—In 1 Corinthians 12:12 ff. (cf. Romans 12:5) St. Paul uses the figure of a body and its members to describe the relations of Christian people to Christ and to one another, and then in 1 Corinthians 12:27 he definitely applies the expression ‘a body of Christ’ (σῶμα Χριστοῦ) to the Corinthian Church. With reference to the body politic the figure was a familiar one in both Greek and Latin literature, and the Apostle transfers it to the Church for the purpose of emphasizing his exhortations to Church unity and a sense of mutual dependence among the people of Christ. As yet, however, the figure is quite plastic, while the anarthrous σῶμα suggests that it is the local Church which is immediately in view. Here, accordingly, we have in their first draft the Apostle’s grand conceptions on the subject of the Lord’s mystical body. When we come to Ephesians (Ephesians 1:22-23; Ephesians 4:12) and Colossians (Colossians 1:18; Colossians 1:24) we find that his ideas have been elaborated, and that ‘the body of Christ’ (τὸ σῶμα τοῦ Χριστοῦ) has become a fixed title of the Church not as local merely, but as universal, nor simply as empiric, but as an ideal magnitude. We notice this further distinction, that in the earlier Epistles Christ is conceived of as the whole body, of which individual Christians are the particular members; while in Ephesians and Colossians He becomes the head of the Church which is His body (Ephesians 5:23-24, Colossians 2:19)—the vital and organic centre of the whole. The idea of this striking figure is similar to that presented by our Lord Himself in the allegory of the Vine and the Branches (John 15:1-8). The lesson of the figure, as of the allegory, is not only that in Christ all believers are bound together into the unity of the Church, but that the spiritual vitality, indeed the very existence, of individual Christians and Christian communities depends upon the closeness of their relations with Jesus Christ who is their head.
(4) Christ’s symbolic body.—On the night in which He was betrayed, Jesus, in instituting the sacrament of the Supper, said of the bread which He took and broke and gave to His disciples, ‘This is my body’ (ταῦτό ἐστι τὸ σῶμά μου: Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:24). Similarly St. Paul, writing to the Corinthians, says of the bread which is broken at the Supper, ‘Is it not the communion of the body of Christ?’ (1 Corinthians 10:16); while in the same Epistle he describes the person who eats the sacramental bread unworthily as ‘guilty of the body of the Lord’ (1 Corinthians 11:27), and says that a man eats and drinks judgment unto himself ‘if he discern not the body’ (1 Corinthians 11:29). Opinions have differed greatly in the Church as to the full significance of this language, whether on the lips of Jesus or of St. Paul. But whatever its further meanings may be, there can be little doubt that primarily the broken bread of the Supper is a symbol of the crucified body of Christ. With this symbolic use of the word ‘body’ many have sought to identify the words of the Lord in the Fourth Gospel about ‘eating the flesh’ of the Son of Man (John 6:53-63). But as the word σῶμα denotes the body as an organism, while ‘flesh’ (σάρξ) applies only to the substance of the body, and as σάρξ is never employed elsewhere in the NT to describe the sacramental bread, it is unlikely either that Jesus would use σάρξ with this intention, or that the author of the Gospel would have failed to use σῶμα, the ordinary sacramental term, if it had been his intention to represent our Lord as furnishing in the Capernaum discourse a prophetic announcement of the institution of the Supper. See art. Lord’s Supper.
Literature.—Grimm-Thayer, Lexicon, s.v.; Cremer, Biblico-Theological Lexicon, s.v.; Laidlaw, Bible Doctrine of Man, s.v.; Salmond, Christian Doctrine of Immortality, s.v. ‘Resurrection’; Lange, Life of Christ, vol. v. p. 126 ff.; Forrest, Christ of History, PP. 150 ff., 411 ff.; Expositor’s Greek Testament, passim; arts. ‘Resurrection’ and ‘Ascension’ in Hasting's Dictionary of the Bible.
F. Meyrick and J. C. Lambert.
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Hastings, James. Entry for 'Body (2)'. Hastings' Dictionary of the New Testament. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/hdn/b/body-2.html. 1906-1918.
