 | | the chief cause of ignorance is the flesh and our affinity for it. Moses himself affirms this when he says "because they are flesh" the divine spirit cannot abide. Marriage, indeed, and the rearing of children, the provision of necessities, the ill repute that comes in the wake of poverty, business both private and public, and a host of other things wilt the flower of wisdom before it blooms. Nothing, however, so thwarts its growth as our fleshly nature.
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| | (Philo 1981, 65)
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Paul also uses similar platonizing imagery, but significantly, without such negative attributes. The clearest example appears in 2 Corinthians 5: 14:
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| | For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.
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Beyond any doubt, Paul refers here to a resurrection in the body, though the resurrected body is not the same kind of body as the one "that we dwell in" now. Paul considers some kind of a body necessary, in order that the human being not be naked, and he polemicizes here against those who deny resurrection in the flesh.
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It is out of the question, therefore, to regard Paul as a radically anti-body dualist on the model of Plotinus, for example. But crucially, Paul maintains an image of the human being as a soul dwelling in or clothed by a body. In the very text in which Paul is valorizing body, arguing against those who deny body, he nevertheless refers to "we who are in this tent."
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The coincidence between Philo and
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| | 2. See also 1 Corinthians 15:3549, a notoriously difficult passage, and discussion in Conzelmann (1976, 28088). According to Robinson (1952, 77), Paul does not refer here to the body of resurrection as in standard commentaries but to the Body of Christ. See also Meeks (1972, 55).
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| | 3. The reason for my qualified language is simply because it is clear here, as well as in 1 Corinthians 15, that the resurrected body is of an entirely transformed nature, apparently a body without "flesh." In general, the solution to some conundra of apparent discontinuities in early Christian discourse, which seems at one and the same time to affirm bodiliness and disavow sexuality, is to emphasize the distinction for some of these writers between "body" and ''flesh." The first is a term that often has positive valence, while it is the latter which is usually of nearly exclusively negative connotation. Robinson (1952) has well drawn this distinction for Paul himself. It is, in this sense, of a body without fleshthat is, a body without sexuality among other mattersthat various early Christian thinkers can assert the positive status of "the body." Thus Verna Harrison informs me that the Cappadocian Fathers held that the creation
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