Psyche #34

Psyche is the Greek word behind English “psychology,” and in the New Testament it is usually translated “soul” or “life.” It is related to a verb for breathing and is the Septuagint’s regular translation of the Hebrew nephesh, so its New Testament meaning is shaped more by that Hebrew word than by Greek philosophy, which often treated the soul as a separable, immortal part of a person.

Biblical Usage

Psyche can mean physical life, as in Jesus’s saying that whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses it for his sake will find it (Matthew 16:25). The same word in the next verse is normally translated “soul”: what would it profit anyone to gain the whole world and lose it (Matthew 16:26)? English translations must choose between “life” and “soul,” and the choice changes how the passage reads. In other places psyche simply means a person, as in the “souls” counted in a crowd, or the self and its desires.

It also refers to something more than the body. Jesus tells his followers not to fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, and to fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Matthew 10:28). In the great commandment the soul is one of the aspects of a person that love for God engages, along with heart, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30).

Theological Significance

Paul’s prayer that “spirit and soul and body” be preserved blameless (1 Thessalonians 5:23) has been read in two main ways. Some traditions hold that human beings are made of three distinct parts, body, soul, and spirit, while others hold that “soul” and “spirit” are two ways of describing one immaterial aspect of a person, in contrast to the body. Others emphasise the older Hebrew sense that a person does not have a soul but is one. The question feeds into how traditions understand death, the intermediate state, and resurrection, and it remains open.