Pauline Anthropology: Temples and Bodies as God’s Sanctuaries

Abstract

Paul related the concepts of the temple, the body and the church to each other in many ways. In Corinth, numerous temples, rich in divine statues in human shape, represented the governing ideology. For the Jews, however, their own national narrative of God’s presence to their nation focused on the tabernacle, on the temple in Jerusalem. Based on the considerable significance of the word ‘body’ both for Greco-Roman and Hebrew symbolic worlds, Paul used the word ‘body’ like a common denominator or a link between the concepts of the temple, the individual human body and the community of believers.