For my part, I can't offer any definitive answer on this, chiefly because I
think there are some unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. For
me the chiefest of these concern the compositional context of Matthew and
particularly of this dominical saying: does an Aramaic original really
underly it, and if so what implications might be drawn from that? On the
surface (where it is most difficult to be sure about things), it really
looks like it's assuming a Hellenistic notion of a separable immortal soul
and a perishable body; at any rate, it appears to me that YUCH here is
closer to a Platonic sense than it is to the notion of the RUACH breathed
into Adam's nostrils in Genesis 2:7 that makes a human being a NEFESH.
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University
Summer: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad@artsci.wustl.edu OR cconrad@yancey.main.nc.us
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/