a member of a body: a limb or organ of a physical body, and, by extension, a person who belongs to a community pictured as one living body.
At its root the word names a part of a living body: an eye, a hand, the tongue. Because a body (σῶμα) has many such parts that are different from one another yet work together as one, the word became a natural picture for people who belong together and depend on one another.
The New Testament takes up that picture and, in Paul especially, makes it central. Believers are the parts of a single body, and that body is Christ. So the same word runs all the way from a literal hand or eye to a Christian joined as one living part to Christ and to fellow Christians. The point of the picture is that the connection is organic and vital, not a matter of signing up.
Between those two uses sits a pointed one in Romans and Colossians: the body's parts are what a person acts through, so they can be handed over to sin as its tools or offered to God for his service. Here the parts are still the literal limbs, but they stand for the whole person as someone who chooses and acts.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether Paul's language of believers as members of Christ is a living metaphor drawn from the body image or a claim that the church genuinely is the risen body of Christ.
- majorityA metaphor or simile: calling believers members of Christ pictures their unity and mutual dependence, as a body's parts depend on one another, without asserting that the church is literally Christ's physical body. More recent participationist readings refine this as a real incorporation into Christ that still stops short of physical identity.; Ernest Best, One Body in Christ (1955); Robert H. Gundry, Sōma in Biblical Theology, with Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology (1976)
- minorityA real corporate organism: the church is the risen body of Christ, so being a member of Christ is more than a figure of speech.; John A. T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology (1952)