THE GREAT JEWISH REVELATION: AN UNDIVIDED BODY-SOUL

In his book Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh, theologian and former Catholic priest Matthew Fox writes: "In Hebrew any body part can be used to represent the whole. While the Greeks pitted the body against soul, the Jews did not….. [For the Jew] man does not have a body, he is a body…. The body is the soul in its outward form." (2)

This view, which saw a human being as a seamless undivided 'body-soul', was far removed from the huge separation between body and soul which had begun to develop, especially in the Greco-Roman world, by the time of Christ and beyond. Religious theories which had travelled along the trade routes from the East and Mesopotamia into the Mediterranean world now began to form the basis of a cluster of powerful new religious movements which became known as Gnosticism. The Gnostics rapidly gained a wide following in the Greco-Roman world, and the movement reached its height during the very period in which the early Christian Church was beginning to find its feet (that is, from 50 to 250 CE).

Of particular significance was the Gnostic teaching that the body, far from being God's creation, was in fact the creation of an evil demon or 'demi-urge'. The body, including and especially the sexual urge, was therefore deeply impure and evil. Only the soul or spirit was said to have been created by God, and therefore good. Gnostic thinking thus totally separated the body from the spirit or soul and set them in implacable opposition one against the other. 'Dualism' is the term given by present day historians and scholars to this unfortunate view. It was a view which led the Gnostics to despise all things sexual and to go as far as declaring sex within marriage at best doubtful, and at worst evil. Groups taught that no-one could be truly pleasing to God if they were also in a sexual relationship, and celibacy and virginity began to be seen as the only truly spiritual way of life.

By the end of the first century Christian churches had begun to face a major problem. It was they who were beginning to be seen as 'unholy' and sexually permissive in a world where the Gnostics held themselves up as the truly spiritual ones standing against every sinful passion of the flesh. Under intense pressure to keep up with so-called Gnostic 'holiness' there began a steady about-face on the matter of the body and sex as leading Church theologians strove to reinterpret their scriptures (both the Old Testament and the emerging New Testament) to match, if not outdo, the Gnostics in teachings on sexual purity.

Tragically they were so successful that by the third century CE the positive view of the body and sex, as taught in the Jewish Bible and the early Apostolic churches, had been totally replaced in official Christian doctrine by this pagan 'dualism' heresy. In fact the Church's dualistic teachings went far further than the Gnostics ever did.

It is important to realise that it is this Gnostic dualism which formed the basis of Christianity's misunderstanding of the body and sexuality for virtually the next two thousand years. The damage caused by such a view has been nothing less than catastrophic and has resulted in a terrible harvest of sexual cruelty, distortion and repression. Even today the hang-over from this heresy lies not far below the surface of the psyche of many evangelical Christians and explains why large sections of the evangelical Church, for all practical purposes, still tend to regard 'sexual sin' as the greatest of all sin.