StrongerBible

psuchikos

ψυχικός

GreekG5591“natural, unspiritual, ...”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

1Co 2:141Co 15:44 (2×)1Co 15:46Jas 3:15Jud 1:19
Root family
Word studypsoo-khee-KOSSadjective

What psuchikos means

describing a person, a body, or a way of thinking that runs on ordinary human life alone, with nothing of God's Spirit in it

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This adjective is built from the everyday Greek noun for the life a person is born with, the breathing, feeling, wanting self (ψυχή). On its own that noun is no insult: it simply means a living human being. The adjective turns it into a boundary. Whatever is called by this word has that ordinary life and nothing beyond it.

Greek adjectives formed this way normally say what something runs on or is characterized by, not what it is made of, the way a wind-driven ship is powered by wind rather than built out of it. That matters most where Paul sets the body that is buried against the body that is raised. On the reading most scholars take, he is not saying the present body is made of soul and the future one made of spirit; he is saying that one is carried along by ordinary human life while the other is brought to life and ruled by God's Spirit.

Every use of the word is pointed, and each one sets it against God's Spirit:

  • the person who cannot take in what God's Spirit teaches (1 Corinthians 2:14)
  • the body that is buried, opposite the body the Spirit raises (1 Corinthians 15:44)
  • wisdom that is earthly rather than from above (James 3:15)
  • people who split the church and do not have the Spirit (Jude 1:19)

Paul may not have coined the label. Many scholars think the Corinthians were calling themselves the spiritual ones (πνευματικός) and using this word for everyone else, and that Paul took the pair back from them and reversed it: the merely human comes first in God's order and the Spirit-given comes afterward. That is why the word never marks a permanent class of person. It describes what a life is currently running on.

Nuances

1aof the present, mortal body: alive with the ordinary life every person is born with, as opposed to the body God raises by his Spirit
CertaintyContested
1Co 15:44 (2×)1Co 15:46
1Co 15:44

Whether the word in 1 Corinthians 15:44 and 15:46 describes what animates the present body or what the present body is composed of.

  • majorityIt describes what animates the body. The present body is plainly not made of soul, so the adjective must name the ordinary human life that keeps it going; its counterpart therefore names the Spirit who will animate the raised body, not a spirit-substance. Greek adjectives with this ending mark function rather than material.; Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT), rev. ed. (2014); Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC) (2000); N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), 283, 347-356; James P. Ware, "Paul's Understanding of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:36-54," JBL 133 (2014)
  • minorityIt describes composition. In Greco-Roman thinking there was no split between matter and spirit, only between heavier and finer kinds of stuff, so Paul contrasts a body of coarse material with a body of the finer material of the heavens.; Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (1995), 104-136; Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (2010)
1bof people who have only that ordinary human life and not God's Spirit
1Co 2:14Jud 1:19
1cof wisdom whose source is nothing higher than ordinary human drives
Jas 3:15

What scholars say about psuchikos

The adjective occurs only 6 times in the New Testament (1 Cor 2:14; 15:44 twice; 15:46; Jas 3:15; Jude 19), and in every case in adversative contrast with pneumatikos. It is absent from the canonical Septuagint; the nearest Jewish-Greek neighbor is the psychikos/somatikos pair at 4 Macc 1:32. In classical and Hellenistic usage (Aristotle, Eth. nic. 3.10.2; Epictetus, Diatr. 3.7.5-7; Plutarch) it denotes the properties or activities of the soul, never a material composition, a datum James Ware presses. The lexica (BDAG; LSJ; Louw-Nida) and Schweizer's TDNT article divide the New Testament usage into two: pertaining to the soul as the animating life-principle (1 Cor 15:44, 46) and merely human, natural, lacking the divine Spirit (1 Cor 2:14; Jas 3:15; Jude 19). Jude 19 supplies an internal gloss, pneuma me echontes. Two debates dominate. First, whether soma psychikon in 1 Cor 15:44-46 marks animation or substance: Wright's morphological argument, that adjectives in -ikos denote function while -inos denotes material, undergirds the majority animation reading (Fee, Thiselton, Hays, Garland, Ware, Dunn, Witherington), while Martin and Engberg-Pedersen read Paul within a Stoic-influenced cosmology of graded material; Barclay and Rabens caution against importing a Stoic material and immaterial binary onto Paul, and Schmisek proposes the phrase functions as a deliberate oxymoron. Second, the origin of the pneumatikos/psychikos pair in 1 Cor 2-3: the older Gnostic-origin thesis (Reitzenstein, Bultmann, Schmithals) is now largely abandoned (Colpe, Wilson, Yamauchi), replaced by a convergent account combining Alexandrian-Jewish wisdom speculation on Gen 1-2 (Pearson, with modifications Horsley and Sterling), a Corinthian-slogan hypothesis in which Paul quotes and subverts his readers' own self-designation (Fee), and a socio-cultural reading of status claims in Roman Corinth (Martin, Winter). Pearson notes that 1 Cor 15:46 inverts the Philonic priority of the heavenly man. Nearly all modern commentators reject a tripartite anthropology in 1 Cor 2:14 to 3:4: psychikos names the person without the Spirit, and Paul's shift to sarkinos and sarkikos at 3:1-3 is an intra-Christian rebuke rather than a third ontological category. On Jas 3:15 the commentators (Ralph Martin, Moo, Johnson) read the triad epigeios, psychike, daimoniodes as a descending or intensifying description of a single wisdom without a heavenly source; Bauckham reads Jude 19 as a counter-charge turning the opponents' own pneumatic claims against them.

Sources

  • BDAG (Bauer-Danker), s.v. ψυχικόςlexicon
  • LSJ (Liddell-Scott-Jones), s.v. ψυχικόςlexicon
  • Louw-Nida, Greek-English Lexicon Based on Semantic Domains, s.v. ψυχικόςlexicon
  • Eduard Schweizer, "ψυχή, ψυχικός," in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (TDNT) 9:608-666dictionary
  • Balz-Schneider, Exegetical Dictionary of the New Testament (EDNT), s.v. ψυχικόςdictionary
  • Gordon D. Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NICNT), rev. ed. (2014)commentary
  • Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (NIGTC) (2000)commentary
  • David E. Garland, 1 Corinthians (BECNT) (2003)commentary
  • Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Interpretation) (1997)commentary
  • N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003)monograph
  • James P. Ware, "Paul's Understanding of the Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:36-54," JBL 133 (2014)article
  • Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (1995)monograph
  • Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul: The Material Spirit (2010)monograph
  • Birger A. Pearson, The Pneumatikos-Psychikos Terminology in 1 Corinthians (SBLDS 12) (1973)monograph
  • Richard A. Horsley, "Pneumatikos vs. Psychikos: Distinctions of Spiritual Status among the Corinthians," HTR 69 (1976): 269-288article
  • James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998), 55-78monograph
  • Ralph P. Martin, James (WBC 48) (1988)commentary
  • Douglas J. Moo, The Letter of James (Pillar) (2000)commentary
  • Luke Timothy Johnson, The Letter of James (AB 37A) (1995)commentary
  • Richard J. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (WBC 50) (1983)commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of ψυχικός

nominative n s

ψυχικόν

1Co 15:44, 1Co 15:44, 1Co 15:46

nominative f s

ψυχικὴ

Jas 3:15

nominative m p

ψυχικοί

Jud 1:19

nominative m s

ψυχικὸς

1Co 2:14