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Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul$
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Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit

Troels Engberg-Pedersen

Print publication date: 2010

Print ISBN-13: 9780199558568

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: May 2010

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199558568.001.0001

A Stoic Understanding of the Pneuma and Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15

Chapter:
(p. 8 ) 1 A Stoic Understanding of the Pneuma and Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15
Source:
Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul
Author(s):

Troels Engberg‐Pedersen

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199558568.003.0002

This chapter develops the ontology of Paul's notion of pneuma (‘spirit’) by analysing the cosmology that seems to be invoked in his account in 1 Corinthians 15 of the specific (ontological) shape of the resurrection body, the ‘pneumatic’ body. It appears that Paul understood the pneuma as a through and through material, bodily phenomenon. The chapter also situates Paul in relation to Graeco-Roman philosophy of his day. Two Alexandrian Jewish Hellenistic writers who were slightly earlier than Paul, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo, display a 1st century bce/ce, incipient interest in and influence from Plato that eventually issued in 1st-2nd century ce ‘Middle Platonism’. For Paul himself, however, the basic, philosophical reference point was materialistic and monistic Stoicism — which indeed was importantly present in the two other writers, too — rather than immaterialistic and dualistic Platonism.

Keywords:   Corinthians, resurrection body, Stoic pneuma, wisdom of Solomon, Philo, stoicism, platonism, middle platonism

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