Afterlife

In part 1 we noted that context established Paul was not teaching anything about the soul when he described his extraordinary experience in 2 Corinthians 12:2-3. He was defending his apostolic credentials against opponents who prized visions and spiritual experiences as the ultimate ministry credential. His double disclaimer, repeated twice with “God knows” each time, reflects genuine bewilderment about an experience that defied every category available to him.

In this article we turn to the decisive argument. Paul used the identical Greek phrase “outside the body” in his previous letter to the same Corinthian believers. What he meant by it there tells us exactly what he means by it here, and it has nothing to do with the soul departing the body.

This article is a follow up to the series on The Immortal Soul. In that series we examined the biblical concept of the soul and worked through the passages most commonly cited in support of the idea that the soul consciously survives the death of the body. One passage we did not address is 2 Corinthians 12:2-3, where Paul writes that he does not know whether his extraordinary experience occurred “in the body or out of the body.”

Most readers assume he is describing the soul’s ability to exist apart from the body. But this reading imports a meaning into the passage that Paul himself refused to assert, twice, and that contradicts his own established usage of the identical Greek phrase in his previous letter to the Corinthians. Read in its proper context, 2 Corinthians 12:2-3 does not support the Platonic view of an immortal separable soul. It actually undermines it.