Pauline Anthropology: Temples and Bodies as God’s Sanctuaries

Paul related the concepts of the temple, the body and the church to each other in many ways. In Corinth, numerous temples, rich in divine statues in human shape, represented the governing ideology. For the Jews, however, their own national narrative of God’s presence to their nation focused on the tabernacle, on the temple in Jerusalem. Based on the considerable significance of the word ‘body’ both for Greco-Roman and Hebrew symbolic worlds, Paul used the word ‘body’ like a common denominator or a link between the concepts of the temple, the individual human body and the community of believers. He utilized this word to designate the human physical existence and refer to the collective, social body, and he made this double meaning understandable to Jewish and Greek readers.

Paul taught Corinthians that their corporate body, the church, was the place where they were to glorify God. His metaphoric extension of the individual body to the body of Christ rests upon Jewish belief in the special relationship between God and his people. The aspects of the concept of body are both corporate Christology and individual Christology.

Keywords: Temple, God, God’s presence, Body individual and Body Communal, Sanctity