Platonic Dualism: Splitting the Body and Soul

Plato offers the first, oldest argument that one’s physical body and soul are separate entities and that one lives on after the other has died. 

There is no mention of an afterlife at all in the Torah, the original/oldest scripture (written between 1000-400 BCE).

When God communicates with the Hebrews in the Torah, his covenant explicitly references rewards in this life, not an afterlife:  moral actions lead to earthly rewards, and vice versa.

Adam and Eve are explicitly ejected from Eden before eating of the tree of immortality.

In contrast, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek myths do explicitly reference and often center around an afterlife.  However, when Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greeks enter this afterlife, it is as a body, as a person:  Gilgamesh and Odysseus (and Hercules) journey to the underworld as a man (or, we might say, a god-man) where Gilgamesh also learns that only gods can have immortality, and where Odysseus sees "shades" of the physical forms of his friends and families; the Egyptian buried the pharaohs with items necessary to continue a physical life in the afterworld, etc. 

There are no references to a “soul” separate from one’s physical body in the older books of the Bible, and those in the newer books are quite vague.

Translation Issues, Again: The Septuagint

Philo Of Alexandria or “Philo The Jew” (20 BC - 50 AD) may have been the first to successfully reconcile Platonism with Hebrew scripture, and although his writings (those that have survived run about 35 volumes) were largely ignored by Jews, they were adopted and maintained by the emerging, nascent Christian community.  Like many Hellenized Jews, Philo was literate in Greek, not Hebrew, and so he studied and cited the Greek Septuagint. Here again we find the profound impact translation has not only on interpretation of text but on history itself.  Philo is able to reconcile Plato’s dualistic conception of man as body/soul because of a simple mistranslation of the Hebrew into Greek.  Quoting from the Septuagint, Philo writes:

“For the food of the body brings pleasures of the earth and rightly so, it would seem. For there are two things of which we consist, soul and body. The body, of course, has been formed from the earth, but the soul belongs to the upper air, a shard detached from the Deity: “For God breathed into [Adam’s] face a breath of life and man became a living soul” [Genesis 2:7].

Here, “living soul” is a literal English translation of the Septuagint's  psyche zoe.  In the original Hebrew, however, the words used are nephesh hayyah, which means “living being”, as in “moving, breathing” (the King James also uses the term “living soul”).

When Christians began reading the Jewish scriptures it would again be in the Greek, not Hebrew, where these Christians too would again and again read mistranslations of unique Hebrew words – and thus ideas­ – transformed into Greek ideas.

The authors of the New Testament also cite the Septuagint, not the Hebrew version of the Hebrew scriptures.

The implications of this “Greekified” reading would of course be compounded when the audience itself of Greco-Roman, an audience which had already been studying and veneratig Plato for at least 400 years.

Ironically, it appears that ancient and medieval Christians found the Platonic origin of these “Christian” concepts somewhat comforting because they already held great respect for Plato and, if anything, the Platonic origin helped legitimize the foreign, exotic, Asian religion of the Jews and Christians;  Plato was (and still is?) considered the very best of what the brilliant Greeks had to offer.  Certainly the fathers of the Christian church, like Augustine, saw it this way. 

Now, of course, teaching this concept in modern America appears nearly blasphemous, but this is likely because American Christians by and large descend from a Northern European Protestant/Calvinist background, and the Reformation/Protestantism was, among many other things, an attempt to break Christianity from it Roman (and thus Greek) traditions.

For more on Judaism and the afterlife, see:   Judaism and the Afterlife I   and Judaism and The Afterlife II

For more on Platonic Dualism, read Plato's Phaedo, or see here.