sōma

The standard lexica treat σῶμα as one word of very wide range rather than a set of homonyms. BDAG runs from the corpse and the living body of humans and animals, through the plural used of slaves and the bodies of plants and heavenly luminaries, to the church as the body of Christ and to the "thing itself, reality" of Colossians 2:17; LSJ records that in Homer the word denotes the dead body, the living body being δέμας, a philological point Bruno Snell built into a larger thesis about Homeric anthropology that classicists have since contested. Louw and Nida distribute the New Testament uses across separate semantic domains for the body, the person, the church, and a slave sold as property. Eduard Schweizer's TDNT article (7:1024-1094) remains the standard survey, although its method is exactly what James Barr's Semantics of Biblical Language attacked, coining "illegitimate totality transfer" for the practice of importing a term's whole lexical range, or a whole theology, into a single occurrence.

The central modern debate is anthropological. Rudolf Bultmann made σῶμα the cornerstone of Pauline anthropology and argued that in its weighty uses it denotes the person as a whole, the self in its capacity to relate to itself and to have a history. Robert Gundry's Soma in Biblical Theology answered that Paul's usage is exception-less for the physical body, and that where the word stands for the person it does so because the person is a bodily creature, not because the noun means "self"; most later scholarship has judged Gundry's case the stronger while retaining the insight that the reference is to the person as embodied. Ernst Käsemann, and following him James Dunn, recast the whole-person reading relationally, as the human being in creaturely relatedness to the world. John A. T. Robinson had earlier pressed a corporate realism about the ecclesial body, and Dale Martin's The Corinthian Body reframed the discussion around ancient medicine and physics, arguing for a porous, socially coded body rather than a neutral biological one. Robert Jewett's Paul's Anthropological Terms remains the standard treatment of how σῶμα and σάρξ shift under polemical pressure. The wider systematic question, holistic dualism (Cooper) against a monistic anthropology (Green), is unresolved but is theological rather than lexical.

Two passages carry most of the exegetical dispute. At 1 Corinthians 11:29 Fee argues that τὸ σῶμα is the church, while Thiselton holds the eucharistic and ecclesial referents to be deliberately intertwined; the manuscripts adding τοῦ κυρίου are a secondary clarification. At 1 Corinthians 15:44 there is now broad agreement that σῶμα πνευματικόν does not mean an immaterial body, but the field divides between the transformed yet physical, Spirit-animated body of Wright and Gundry and the finer spiritual substance of Martin and Hart, the difference turning on ancient physics of πνεῦμα. On the ecclesial image, Michelle Lee's derivation from Stoic and body-politic material has largely displaced the mid-century gnostic Urmensch hypothesis, and Daniel Lynwood Smith argues that Paul subverts the Menenius Agrippa fable by withholding the ruling belly and honouring the weaker members. In Septuagint usage σῶμα renders בָּשָׂר, גְּוִיָּה and נְבֵלָה among others, with בָּשָׂר far more often rendered σάρξ; the most consequential divergence is Psalm 40:6, where the Greek "a body you have prepared for me" stands where the Hebrew has "ears you have dug for me", supplying the text quoted at Hebrews 10:5.