Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/198

186 Just what the relationship is that exists between the soul and the body Jesus does not describe. If the words put into his mouth by Luke, "a spirit hath not flesh and bones as ye see I have," were actually his, he apparently distinguished between a ghost and a genuine human personality. But these words introduce so many difficulties, both critical and philosophical, that it will hardly be advisable to rest much argument upon them until they have been given a more careful examination than is here desirable.

In general Jesus distinguished between only physical and spiritual phenomena, and his language, though never technical, is yet sufficiently definite to make it certain that he never held to the trichotomy that possibly characterized the cruder psychology of the early Hebrew scriptures. At all events, the one class of phenomena did not spring from the other. That which is born of the flesh is flesh. Only that born of the spirit is spirit. It would certainly be inadmissable to consider his reply to the lawyer, "Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy understanding," as anything more than a Hebrew cumulative emphasis. So far was Jesus from being a trichotomist as sometimes to seem to approach a sort of psychological monism, in which the unity of body and soul constitutes a single life. However this may be, the significance of Paul's treatment of the resurrection of Jesus the type of the race, lies