flesh: the soft tissue of a body, and by extension a human being in creaturely weakness, who one is by birth, and (in Paul) human life turned away from God and set against his Spirit.
At its root this word means the soft flesh of a body, the muscle and tissue you can touch. From there it spreads outward in steps.
- It can mean the body one lives in, with all its frailty and suffering.
- It can mean the whole human creature, so that "all flesh" is simply everyone alive, and "flesh and blood" is a person as opposed to God.
- It can mean who someone is by birth and family, which is what "according to the flesh" usually points to.
- And it can mean the merely human and outward, what a person is or boasts in on their own, apart from God.
Paul then sharpens it one step further. He uses "flesh" for human life left to itself, weak and pulled toward sin, the side of a person that fights against God's Spirit (πνεῦμα). This is not the body as a physical thing. The same Paul says he still lives "in the flesh" and looks for the body (σῶμα) to be raised. So "flesh" in this charged sense names a direction or condition of the whole self, not skin and bone.
The path that loaded the word this way ran through the Old Testament, not pagan Greek. In ordinary Greek "flesh" carried no moral weight at all. When Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew Scriptures, they used this word for the Hebrew word for flesh (בשׂר), which already pictured humanity as frail and mortal before God. Jewish writers around Paul's time pressed it closer to sinfulness, calling themselves creatures of "perverse flesh." Paul took up that frailty-and-sin picture and tied it to Christ and the Spirit.
Because one short word covers this whole range, the same form can mean the body, a family line, all people, or sin's foothold, and only the surrounding words show which. That is why translators reach for so many different English words, and why it is so easy to read the wrong one into a verse.
Nuances
Disputed
How to construe Paul's "flesh" when it is set against the Spirit, as in Romans 7 to 8 and Galatians 5. There is broad agreement that it does not simply equal the physical body and that the dualism in Paul is between two ages or conditions, not between matter and spirit; the disagreement is over what kind of thing the flesh is. The near-neutral kinship and "according to the flesh" uses, and the plainly physical uses, are not in dispute.
- contestedA cosmic power or sphere of fallen existence, read alongside Sin and Death as ruling forces from which a person must be delivered.; Ernst Käsemann, Perspectives on Paul (1971); Commentary on Romans (1980); J. Louis Martyn, Galatians, Anchor Bible 33A (1997); Beverly Roberts Gaventa, Romans, NTL (2024); Gordon D. Fee, God's Empowering Presence (1994)
- contestedAn orientation of the self: human existence relying on and boasting in what is its own, turned in on itself and away from God.; Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, vol. 1 (1951)
- contestedThe fallen sinful disposition of a person, the inner bent toward sin that the Spirit opposes (the traditional Reformed reading).; Douglas J. Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, NICNT, 2nd ed. (2018); Thomas R. Schreiner, Romans, BECNT, 2nd ed. (2018)
- contestedA sliding range that resists a single label: the same word runs from physical body to kinship to weakness to self-reliance to a near-personified opposing power, and a mediating view treats Paul's flesh as anthropological in reference but having taken on the character of a power-sphere under his message about Christ and the Spirit.; James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998); Alexander Sand, "σάρξ," EDNT vol. 3; Der Begriff "Fleisch" (1967); Robert Jewett, Paul's Anthropological Terms (1971)