Did Jesus sacrifice his soul to save ours?

score:9

Accepted answer

what I am asking is that you evaluate my interpretation of the Scriptures

Faulty / Insufficient.

The conclusions you have drawn from these verses are quite different from what most Christian scholars through the ages have concluded. In fact they are almost completely novel. Arriving at a novel conclusion not held by your own or any other major tradition is usually a pretty good sign that you've done something wrong. This is one of the the main reasons studying history and general theology is an important accompaniment to reading the Scriptures. As humans we are individually far too prone to er for our own judgment in isolation to be a reliable guide.

The related issues raised by this question have of course been discussed forward and backwards many times in the course of history. Many of the issues have never been universally agreed upon (e.g. does man have a unitary, bipartite, or tripartite nature?) and the various implications of different positions have been drawn out in different ways by different frameworks. What's notably different about your question is you are trying to solve detail that must come late the chain training without having laid the necessary interpretive groundwork to even use the related terminology. It's sort of like trying to select a windshield for purchase before figuring out whether you own a motorcycle or a car.

I think the first major place your reasoning jumped the tracks would be in not taking into account the basic historical and grammatical context of the verses you include in your search. This is leg work that you need to do early on. In this case skipping this step left you fitting together pieces that don't even belong to the same puzzle--a common enough problem you don't actually follow a disciplined step of examining the language and context involved.

For example, in the expressions "in whom my soul is well pleased" and "my soul is exceeding sorrowful" you assume that the word soul refers to something specific that the original language likely did not intend. If I were to say "that story broke my heart", you would not call up the closest hospital looking for a cardiologist to fix the organ pumping blood through my body. You instinctively understand that I am using an expression to tell you something about how deeply my emotions were effected. This is easy if you are fluent in English. Translate that into a language that uses different idioms and they might take you all wrong. Likewise if you do an English word search for "soul" in the Bible, a large portion of the references are not even going to be about your soul and you will be missing several that are! You should be much, much more cautious about linking verses in the way this question does before you have determined what the author of each was trying to communicate. Until you strike on a passage that is specifically trying to teach something about the physical vs. non-physical nature of man, don't try to use it to interpret other verses. This error is what must commonly leads to bogus proof-texting.

We do use Scripture to interpret Scripture, but it must be done by using passages that are clear on a subject to understand ones that are not. Using ones that are not even about a subject to interpret other ones is not a sound plan. Having arrived at a novel conclusion about a significant theological issue should send you back to check your methodology.

Using the King James translation here has certainly not set you up for success. I suggest you research and find a replacement (or at least a companion) translation to use in your studies. Looking through your list there appear to be several verses where you have tripped up for no other reason than because of the changing nuances of English. The KJV is actually a very faithful and remarkable translation. However, it was written to the understanding of a people speaking a language that you do not speak. You speak a derivative of that language, granted, but not the same one. Enough has changed that unless you are a period language expert, the KJV rendering is often going to lead you astray rather than towards the truth.

As far as the other specifics of your question, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to attempt an answer speaking for all of Christianity when it is not even apparent what the question would be (if any) given the lack of interpretive groundwork. But --as a gross generalization-- I think the answer would be no: the main thing happening on the cross was not especially related to Jesus soul. What it was is a subject for another question (or venue).

Upvote:2

Yes.

If you define soul according to Genesis 2:7; which says:

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

then something physical has to be part of the soul.

(the dust of the ground somehow becomes a living soul)

So, if the body really is at least one part of the soul, then Jesus really did sacrifice his soul (or at least part of his soul) to save ours.

Upvote:6

For one thing, while ψυχη (transliterated psuchḗ or psyche) is often translated soul as in the verses you have quoted, it is also just as often translated as life as in:

Matthew 10:39 (KJV) He that findeth his life shall lose it:and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.

So for every verse where soul is used, try substituting life and see if it makes more sense. I know that this is not always the case, often soul really was the intended meaning of the word, but this I think is the source the of the confusion.


As for that final verse there is a similar confusion: τελοσ (transliterated telos) is definitely usually translated end, but it means "end" as in "fulfillment", or "aim" or "outcome" or "revenue" (taken from various verses in other translations), not "end" like annihilation.

Given this understanding and the fact that the rest of the verse is about "fulfilling" prophecy, I would go with most other translators (including those for the ESV) in choosing to translate telos as fulfillment in this verse rather than end.

Luke 22:37 (ESV) For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: 'And he was numbered with the transgressors.' For what is written about me has its fulfillment.

Upvote:8

As Caleb pointed out, most of these verses you have quoted aren’t actually using the word “soul” to refer to the same theological concept you’re trying to get at. As an addendum to that, I note that one reason for that discrepancy in usage is that you’ve selected a bunch of New Testament verses that are quoting the Septuagint. Matthew 12 is quoting Isaiah 42; Matthew 26 is quoting Psalm 42 (LXX 41); Matthew 16 and Mark 8 are quoting Psalm 49 (LXX 48). (The other NT passages you’ve quoted using that word appear to indeed be referring to the concept you’re interested in.)

The Septuagint is a translation from Hebrew and has certain peculiarities that arise from its subservience to the Hebrew in many portions, including the psalms. In Hebrew, the word for soul is nephesh. It has a much broader range than the English soul, and (as I recently learned), it can also be used as an emphatic pronoun, similar to English usage of the reflexive pronoun, e.g. “I myself...”. Although this is not the standard usage of the Greek psyche, to quote BDAG, a Greek lexicon (abbreviations expanded, transliteration added):

In various Semitic languages the reflexive relationship is paraphrased with נֶפֶשׁ [nephesh] .... the corresponding use of ψυχή [psyche] may be detected in certain passages in our literature, especially in quotes from the OT and in places where OT modes of expression have had considerable influence.

The broad semantic range of nephesh needs to be kept in mind when analyzing the use of psyche in passages that have their origins in Hebrew texts.

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