perishable: made of the kind of stuff that wears out, decays, and dies
This word describes anything built out of material that will not last. It is not a judgment that the thing is bad or worthless; it is a statement about how long it can hold together. A wreath dries out, silver and gold get spent, seed rots in the ground, and a human body wears down and finally dies. Greek writers used this adjective to sort the whole world into two shelves, and this is the lower shelf: whatever belongs to the realm of coming into being and passing away.
In Scripture it lands in three ways that all say the same thing about different subjects.
- Of a person it says the human being is mortal, made of material that fails.
- Of an object it says the thing will wither, be used up, or rot away.
- Standing on its own, with no noun attached, it names our present dying condition itself, "the perishable."
Its exact opposite is ἄφθαρτος, "imperishable," and the New Testament almost always sets the two in the same sentence so that the contrast carries the argument: perishable images against the imperishable God (Romans 1:23), a perishable wreath against an imperishable one (1 Corinthians 9:25), perishable seed against imperishable seed (1 Peter 1:23). The word for the decay itself is φθορά, and the word for the opposite state is ἀφθαρσία.
Paul also stacks it with θνητός, "mortal," writing that this perishable must put on imperishability and this mortal must put on immortality. The two words are close but not identical: one says a thing dies, the other says a thing comes apart. Together they name what is wrong with the bodies we have now, and the promise is that this same body gets clothed with something lasting rather than traded in for something else.
Nuances
What Paul's perishable and imperishable contrast in 1 Corinthians 15:53 to 54 assumes about the body.
- majorityPaul works within Jewish apocalyptic eschatology: τὸ φθαρτόν denotes present mortal, decay-liable bodily existence, and the emphatic τοῦτο with ἐνδύσασθαι indicates that the same body is transformed rather than exchanged, so the antithesis runs between two modes of embodiment in two ages, not between matter and spirit.; N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God, chs. 7-8; Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC); Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT)
- minorityPaul's antithesis is read within a Hellenistic philosophical and physiological frame, so that the perishable and the imperishable mark grades of substance, the resurrection body being composed of a finer pneumatic material.; Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body; Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians (Hermeneia)