12. From where did Christendom get its teaching about the immortal soul?

¹² Why does Christendom teach something so different from what the Bible says? The New Catholic Encyclopedia, in its article “Soul, Human, Immortality Of,” says that early Church Fathers found support for belief in an immortal soul, not in the Bible, but in “the poets and philosophers and general tradition of Greek thought . . . Later, the scholastics preferred to make use of Plato or principles from Aristotle.” It states that “the influence of Platonic and Neoplatonic thought”—including belief in the immortal soul—eventually was inserted “into the very core of Christian theology.”

Body and Soul

18. How did some Greek philosophers react to Paul’s statement that Jesus had been resurrected, and why?

¹⁸ When the apostle Paul was in Athens, he preached the good news to a crowd that included some Greek philosophers. They listened to his discussion about the one true God and his call to repentance. But what happened next? Paul concluded his speech, saying: “[God] has set a day in which he purposes to judge the inhabited earth in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and he has furnished a guarantee to all men in that he has resurrected him from the dead.” Those words caused a stir. “When they heard of a resurrection of the dead, some began to mock.” (Acts 17:22-32) Theologian Oscar Cullmann observes: “For the Greeks who believed in the immortality of the soul it may have been harder to accept the Christian preaching of the resurrection than it was for others. . . . The teaching of the great philosophers Socrates and Plato can in no way be brought into consonance [agreement] with that of the New Testament.”