iv. ANTHROPOLOGY.—The development in regard to the doctrine of man is not so remarkable. In
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general we find just the OT anthropology in the Apoerypha, though it is in some respects stated with greater precision and clearness. On one or two important points, however, there is a distinct deviation from the OT position.
1. Psychological nature of man.—As to his nature and origin, man is a creature of God, consisting of soul and body. There seems to be no distinction made between mvedua and yvy7; at all events there is no trichotomy. The fullest conception of man’s personality is found in the Book of Wisdom ; but, although on some other points the phraseology of that book is distinctly of a Platonic cast, it nowhere adopts Plato’s doctrine of a tripartite nature in man, 154 being only an apparent exception. This is the more remarkable in that it was the accepted theory of the Alexandrian school, and became one of the tenets of Philo (de Sommn. i. 22) and of Josephus (Ané.1.i. 12). But we have here only one instance out of several in which the writer shows his inde- pendence of the Hellenistic philosophy ; he can apply it on occasion to the kernel of OT dogma with very fruitful results, but he is not its slave. His position as to the derivation of the human soul is that of creationism, not traducianism. The spiritual ego, which is distinct from the body, comes directly from God, and attaches itself to the body at birth. But at this point we meet with a real variation from OT doctrine. Our author teaches the pre-existence of the human soul. When good, it enters an undefiled body ($1), Some dispute this interpretation of the passage, but the influence of Gr. philosophy is undoubtedly traceable here, as also in the further statement that the body is only an ‘earthly frame’ for the mind (voids, 95). The soul is temporarily lent to the body, which must after a brief space restore it and then return to dust (15°). Here the Jewish doctrine of the resurrection of the body is abandoned in favour of the Gr. conception of the immortality of the soul. The writer’s ideas of
re-existence and dualism are borrowed from the bethnpetean and Platonic doctrines respectively. With regard to pre-existence, we may compare the disciples’ question in Jn 9? ‘Who did sin, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ This re- mained for long the main prop of the pre-existence
doctrine, and it shows how readily uneducated ' people must have picked up pany philosophical doctrines which did not seem directly to clash with sacred religious customs. One of the alternatives here is, of course, that possibly the man had sinned before his birth. Viewed in the light of the sub- sequent remark to the man himself, § Thou wast altogether born in sins,’ this seems incapable of explanation except on the theory that there had become visible in this way the punishment of sin committed in a pre-existent state. The saying is probably to be traced to the influence of the Essenes, who in spite of their exclusiveness com- manded the reverence of the populace as strict moralists, and as a secret order representing the occult and mysterious. At all events, it shows how deeply foreign views had imprinted them- selves on the Jewish theology of the time, and that with regard to anthropology as well as other doctrines. In the attempt to solve the perennial riddle, What is man? the dualistic theory lies midway between the two extremes of materialism and pantheism. But, while dualism is right as to the combination in man’s nature of the animal and the spiritual, it settles nothing as to the union of those two elements. On this point, indeed, the Gr. philosophers, and after them the Gnostics, indulge in the wildest speculations. Sense is made to take the place of sin, and the body is viewed as in’itself evil, seeing it originates from a principle opposed to the Divine elemeni in the human spirit. In
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contrast to this the Jewish anthropology as em- bodied in the OT taught the creation of man, of his body, and his soul, by an act of the Divine will (Gn 1°” [P] 27 [J]). Pre-existence is nowhere taught in the OT, Ps 139, which is perhaps the nearest approach to it, being simply a poetic de- scription of growth in the womb. That in the centuries immediately preceding the Christian era
‘the scriptural doctrine was seriously endangered
from the side of speculative philosophy, is clear from the Book of Wisdom itself. According to Langen, the writer does no more than clothe genuine Jewish doctrine in a Gr. dress, thereby establishing it with a precision corresponding to the danger it had to meet; but, in view of his position with regard to pre-existence and dualism, the statement requires modification. In connexion with the latter point it should be noted that if in 915, influenced by the Platonic idea that the body is the soul’s prison, the author means that the body led man into sin, he ascribes this in another passage to the envy of the devil (2%). The most probable explanation of this divergence appears to be that he was trying to find a via media be- tween philosophy and Scripture.