IS OUR SOUL IMMORTAL? (5) What did the early Christians teach about the soul and immortality? Where did Christendom get its ideas about immortality of the soul? IMMORTALITY The word “immortality” does appear in the apocryphal book of Wisdom, which was originally written not in Hebrew but in Greek, and is sometimes inserted into the pre-Christian Hebrew Scriptures. But even this apocryphal book does not say that the soul is immortal. This Catholic dictionary says specifically that “it is probable that in Wisdom immortality means the imperishable life that will be given to the elect in their resurrected bodies.” It adds: “In the New Testament also immortality is gained only in the resurrection. . . . This is the reward which awaits the just on Judgment Day.”—Column 854. Actually, the words “immortal” and “immortality” are rarely used in the Bible. In the King James Version they appear a total of only six times. At 1 Timothy 1:17 and 6:16 God and Christ are spoken of as being immortal, or incorruptible. At Romans 2:7 immortality (or incorruptibility) is spoken of, not as something inherent in man, but as something to be ‘sought.’ Second Timothy 1:10 says Christ ‘shed light’ on this subject. Finally, at 1 Corinthians 15:53, 54, the word “immortality” is used twice, not to describe something people have, but something they must “put on.” Thus, the Bible teaches that the soul is the life you enjoy. Your soul is YOU. When you live, you are a living soul. When you die, the soul is dead. Then, is there no hope for man? Yes, there is hope. But it does not depend upon your having an “immortal soul.” Instead, it depends upon one’s being covered by the ransom sacrifice of Jesus Christ, so that he will be resurrected, or restored to life, on a perfected paradise earth after God destroys the present wicked system and establishes righteous conditions of lasting peace and justice earth wide.—Rev. 20:11-13; 21:1-4. This resurrection hope, rarely discussed in today’s churches, is taught in both the Hebrew and the Christian Greek Scriptures of the Bible, and was stressed by first-century Christians. In fact, one modern religious authority said: “The most startling characteristic of the first Christian preaching is its emphasis on the resurrection.”8 Knowing the Bible truth about the soul enables you to make a vital decision. What is that? To determine which religion is true and which religion is false. For any religion that teaches the false doctrine of the immortality of the soul must be false. This being so, will you continue to associate with such or will you associate with those who teach God’s truth? REFERENCES 1 Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, Justin Martyr, Dialogue V. 2 Oration to the Greeks, Tatian, Section 13. Quoted from French translation, Discours contre les Grecs, in Les Pères de l’Eglise, by de Genoude (Paris; 1838), p. 233. 3 Patrology, Berthold Altaner (originally published in German as Patrologie) (Friedberg, West Germany; 1960), p. 207. 4 Dictionnaire Encyclopèdique de la Bible, edited by Alexandre Westphal (Valence-sur-Rhone, France; 1956), Vol. 2, p. 557, column 1. 5 Ibid., column 2. 6 Ibid., column 1. 7 Ibid., column 2. 8 The New Bible Dictionary, edited by J. D. Douglas (London; 1962), p. 1086. [Footnotes] For examples see Leviticus 21:11; Numbers 6:6. More than eighty instances in which the Bible refers to the soul as being capable of dying are cited on pages 3558, 3559 of the 1963 one-volume edition of the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures. When you look these verses up in your modern translation of the Bible, you may find that the word “soul” has been replaced by “body,” “man,” “me,” “person,” or another word. This is because translators who believed that the Bible teaches the soul is immortal obviously encountered a problem of conscience when they came across passages that say it dies. However, in each of the above-mentioned instances the word used in the Bible’s original Hebrew language is néphesh, which these same translators rendered elsewhere as “soul.” The Hebrew word for “soul” is used 750 times in the Bible to refer to (1) a person, an individual, or a lower animal, or (2) the life that a person or animal enjoys as such. This is entirely different from the ideas modern Christendom has inherited from the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:40:37 +0000