depart from the body and exist apart from it. The latter usage may also be very early and certainly persists very late. But in the majority of cases, the נפט )meaning life or soul) is not a hypostasis, but a quality or characteristic of a living being. As the seat of appetite, emotion, mentality, and moral and religious experience, the usage of נפש is closely parallel to that of רוּחַ . But while נפש is often used for life, רוּחַ is only rarely so used and then chiefly with reference to God as the source of life.

בְּשָׂר is fundamentally and prevailingly a physical term. Its only departure from this physical sense is in its employment by metonymy for kindred and for a corporeal living being. At the latter point, it becomes a synonym of נפש, the one extending its psychical sense to include the physical and the other its physical to include the psychical. It never acquires a mental, moral, or religious sense. Its nearest approach to such meaning and this still very remote-is its use with the suggestion of weakness and frailty.

Broadly speaking, therefore,רוּחַ is physical-religious-psychical; נֶפֶשׁ is psychical-vital; בָּשָׂר is physical.

But an instructive parallel may also be drawn between the usage of each of the three Hebrew terms and the corresponding Greek words, viz. between רוּחַ and πνεῦμα ; between נפט and ψυχή; between בָּשָׂר and σάρξ

The fundamental meaning of רוּחַ and πνεῦμα is the same, viz., wind. The first extant instances of this meaning of πνεῦμα date from the fifth century B.C. רוּחַ appears in this sense in the oldest Old Testament literature, and is therefore at least as old as the eighth century B.C. But in the same period also we find רוּחַ meaning spirit, and used of the spirit of God. The application to the demonic spirit may perhaps be the earliest, but the application to the spirit of God seems to arise out of its use meaning wind, rather than from the idea of the demon, and the use to denote the spirit of man is apparently later than with reference to the spirit of God. Both these latter ideas retain a quantitative feeling, even after the terms have come to be used personally and individually. The meaning "breath" is apparently the latest of all to appear.

The development of the usage of πνεῦμα is somewhat different. From the primitive meaning "wind" arises the meaning "breath," and from this in a purely physical sense come the meanings "breath of life," "life." On this basis apparently is developed the conception of a soul-stuff, out of which individual souls come and to which they return. At the close of the classical period there is the suggestion of an extension of this idea by which πνεῦμα becomes the basis of all existence. In the post-classical period we shall see this developing into the conception of divine spirit, πνεῦμα θεῖον, at first at least quantitatively thought of. But of the deification of the πνεῦμα there are no discoverable traces in the classical period.

Alike, therefore, in the starting-point and in the general range of usage there is a large measure of parallelism between the Hebrew and Greek terms,רוּחַ and πνεῦμα. But the order in which meanings are developed is not the same, and the Hebrews were far in advance of the Greeks in developing the idea of the divine spirit.

נפש apparently begins with the notion of a living being resident in a living animal or man-the ghost, so to speak, within an embodied living being. The earliest extant usage of ψυχή is to denote the shade of a once-living being, the ghost that escapes from the body when it dies. From these kindred starting-points both the Hebrew and the Greek terms develop with no marked difference in order, the meanings "life," that quality or element of a living being which constitutes it living, and "soul" as the seat of various emotions, capacities, etc. The Hebrew writers ascribe a נפט only to man and the lower animals (except as it is by anthropomorphism used of God), and this is also the use of ψυχή in most of the Greek writers, but Plato believes in a ψυχή of the universe, and Aristotle ascribes ψυχή (in a limited sense of the term) to plants. As to the capacity of the soul for existence apart from the body and after death, both Hebrew and Greek writers differ among themselves. Some of the Psalms affirm it, some seem to deny, Ecclesiastes is skeptical. So Homer and the tragic poets presuppose a shadowy existence after death; Socrates is agnostic about the future of the soul; Xenophon is hopeful; Plato affirms; and Aristotle denies.

Both בָּשָׂר and σάρξ are primarily physical terms, both pass from the meaning "flesh" in the strict sense to the more general meaning "body." The Hebrew term is used by metonymy to denote one's kindred, and as a general term for man and animals, or for humanity as such. Neither term has any ethical significance. Plato regards the body as a drag upon the soul, conceiving that the latter can achieve its full freedom and highest development only when freed from the former, but he apparently never uses σάρξ in this connection, and does not ascribe to the σῶμα a distinctly ethical significance. Of any corrupting power of either body or flesh to drag down the soul there is no trace in the Old Testament. The בָּשָׂר is sometimes spoken of as weak, but never as a power for evil.

THE IDEA OF PRE-EXISTENCE IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL

R. H. STRACHAN

St. Columba's Presbyterian Church, Cambridge, Englan

There are various utterances that are put in the mouth of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, that convey the idea of pre-existence as an integral part of his self-consciousness. These may be thus classified: (1) the various passages where he speaks of himself as "coming down from heaven" (3:13; 3:31; 6:33; 6:38); (2) "Before Abraham was, I am" (8:58); (3) "And now, O Father, glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee, before the world was" (17:4, 5); (4) "Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world" (17:24).

1. Are we to regard these utterances as the creation of the thought of the evangelist? Or are they to be regarded, if not necessarily verbally accurate, yet as expressing a real aspect of the consciousness of Jesus? On the former hypothesis, they are to be connected with the thought of the Prologue, and in them the evangelist applies to the person of Jesus the dogmatic conception of his person with which, it is supposed, he starts out to write his Gospel. Jesus is represented as speaking in the person of the Logos incarnate. Before his incarnate existence, he lived in glory with the Father, and brings with him into the world the memory of that pre-temporal existence. If that interpretation holds, we have no other alternative than to regard the consciousness of Jesus in this respect of pre-existence, in the Fourth Gospel, as entirely the creation of the evangelist under the influence of the Logos theology. It may, however, seriously be questioned, whether, supPosing that these utterances are thus regarded as springing from the thought of the Prologue, such an expression of the consciousness

It may be noted that the conception of Jesus as chosen by a pre-temporal act of God for his mission on earth is not peculiarly Johannine, e.g., Matt. 3:17; 12:18, where the tenses of ἠρέτισα, and εὐδόκησα are adapted, in order to emphasize pretemporal existence.

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of pre-existence does not go considerably beyond the conception of the Prologue itself. The Prologue certainly identifies Jesus with the pre-existing Logos. But the Logos, at least in vss. 1-13 of the Prologue, is not personified in the sense that it is regarded as having a separate existence in relation to God. The word was πρὸς τὸν θεόν, but it is immediately added that the Logos was θεός. Here there appears that tendency that is apparent in the Hebrew thought regarding both the Word and Wisdom, to give what amounts to no more than a poetical quasi-personification to them. The tendency sprang from a certain unwillingness to bring the Holy God into immediate contact with the world and with men. This tendency existed side by side with another form of thought that represents God as directly fashioning and forming the world and men. The two tendencies are represented in the two accounts of creation in Genesis. In chap. 1, God's Spirit broods on the face of the deep. He speaks, and creation comes into being. In chap. 2, on the other hand, we have a much more anthropomorphic conception of God. "Instead of lifting God far above man and nature, this writer revels "in the most exquisite anthropomorphisms; he does not shrink from speaking of God as walking in the garden in the cool of the day, or making experiments for the welfare of his first creature (2:18 ff.), or arriving at a knowledge of man's sin by a searching examination" (Skinner, Genesis, p. 51). The reaction from this anthropomorphic point of view is responsible for the idea that God in his work of creation must employ an intermediary, and in this case the intermediary is the Word of God. However far this reaction proceeded in the direction of really personifying the agencies employed, in subsequent thought, e.g., in the post-canonical books, and in the Targums, there can be little doubt that in the canonical Scripture itself we have no more than quasi-personification. And it seems to me that the fourth evangelist in his statement in 1:1, that the "Logos was God," is really only saving himself from a denial of monotheism. The Prologue certainly identifies Jesus with the Logos, but the identification sounds much more like an attempt to state semi-philosophically, with Greek readers and popular Greek thought in view, a conclu

Cf. Abelson, The Immanence of God in Rabbinical Literature, p. 161.