What is the human soul?

Part 1:
Your View of the Soul Affects Your Life

“The man came to be a living soul.”—GENESIS 2:7.

NEARLY all religions teach that man has an immortal soul. The New Catholic Encyclopedia says that the soul is “created by God and infused into the body at conception.” It also says that the doctrine of the immortal soul “is one of the cornerstones” of Christendom’s churches. Similarly, “the Moslem concept,” states The New Encyclopædia Britannica, “holds that the soul comes into existence at the same time as the body; thereafter, it has a life of its own, its union with the body being a temporary condition.”
Such religions believe that the soul leaves the body at the instant of death and lives on eternally, its destiny being heavenly bliss, a temporary stay in purgatory, or eternal torment in a fiery hell. Death is viewed as the doorway to eternal life in the spirit realm. As one writer said in the book We Believe in Immortality: “I view Death as a great and glorious adventure. I view Death as a divine promotion.”
Hindus, Buddhists, and others believe in transmigration. This includes the belief that at death the soul is reincarnated, reborn as another human or another living thing. If a person had been good, it is said that his soul would be reborn as a person of higher station. But if he had been bad, he would be reborn as a person of lower station or even as an animal or an insect.
However, what if humans do not have an immortal soul? What if death is not “a divine promotion,” not the immediate doorway to eternal spirit life or to reincarnation for all who die? Then the immortal-soul belief would lead one in the wrong direction. The book Official Catholic Teachings says that the church insists on the immortal-soul belief because not believing it “would render meaningless or unintelligible her prayers, her funeral rites and the religious acts offered for the dead.” So one’s course of life, worship, and eternal future are involved.—Proverbs 14:12; Matthew 15:9.
It is important to know the truth about this belief. Jesus said: “Those worshiping [God] must worship with spirit and truth.” (John 4:24) The truth about the human soul is found in God’s Word, the Bible. The inspired Scriptures contain God’s revelation of his purposes, so we can be confident that it tells us the truth. (1 Thessalonians 2:13; 2 Timothy 3:16, 17) Jesus said in prayer to God: “Your word is truth.”—John 17:17.

Part 2:

Created With an Immortal Soul?

Genesis 2:7 tells us: “Jehovah God proceeded to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man came to be a living soul.” The account does not say that God implanted in man an immortal soul. It says that when God’s power energized Adam’s body, he “came to be a living soul.” So man is a soul. He does not have a soul.
God created Adam to live on earth, not in heaven. Earth was not to be a mere testing ground to see if Adam qualified for heaven. God formed the earth “to be inhabited,” and Adam was its first human inhabitant. (Isaiah 45:18; 1 Corinthians 15:45) Later, when God created Eve as a wife for Adam, God’s purpose for them was that they should populate the earth and turn it into a paradise as humankind’s eternal home.—Genesis 1:26-31; Psalm 37:29.
Nowhere does the Bible say that part of Adam was immortal. On the contrary, his existence was conditional, based on obedience to God’s law. If he broke that law, what then? Eternal life in the spirit realm? Not at all. Instead, he would “positively die.” (Genesis 2:17) He would go back where he came from: “Dust you are and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 2:7; 3:19) Adam had no existence before he was created, and he would have none after he died. So he had only two choices: (1) obedience and life or (2) disobedience and death. If Adam had not sinned, he would have lived on earth forever. He would never have gone to heaven.
Adam disobeyed, and he died. (Genesis 5:5) Death was his punishment. It was not a doorway to a “glorious adventure” but a doorway to nonexistence. Thus, death is not a friend but is what the Bible calls it, an “enemy.” (1 Corinthians 15:26) If Adam had had an immortal soul that would go to heaven if he was obedient, then death would have been a blessing. But it was not. It was a curse. And with Adam’s sin, the curse of death spread to all humans because all are his offspring.—Romans 5:12.
Further, if Adam had been created with an immortal soul that would be tormented forever in a fiery hell if he sinned, why was he not warned about this? Why was he only told that he would die and return to dust? How unfair it would have been to condemn Adam to an eternity of torture for disobedience, yet not warn him about it! However, with God “there is no injustice.” (Deuteronomy 32:4) There was no need to warn Adam about a fiery hell for the immortal souls of the wicked. Such a hell did not exist, nor did immortal souls exist. (Jeremiah 19:5; 32:35) There is no eternal torment in the dust of the ground.

Part 3:

Bible’s Use of “Soul”

In the Hebrew Scriptures, the English word “soul” comes from the Hebrew word nephesh, which appears over 750 times. Its equivalent in the Greek Scriptures is psykhe, which appears over 100 times. The New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures consistently renders these words as “soul.” Other Bibles may use a variety of words. Some of the ways the King James Version translates nephesh are: appetite, beast, body, breath, creature, dead (body), desire, heart, life, man, mind, person, self, soul, thing. And it translates psy‧khe′ as: heart, life, mind, soul.
The Bible calls sea creatures nephesh: “Every living soul that is in the waters.” (Leviticus 11:10) The word can refer to land animals: “Let the earth put forth living souls according to their kinds, domestic animal and moving animal and wild beast.” (Genesis 1:24) Hundreds of times nephesh means people. “All the souls who issued out of Jacob’s upper thigh came to be seventy souls.” (Exodus 1:5) An example of psykhe being used this way is 1 Peter 3:20. It tells of Noah’s ark, “in which a few people, that is, eight souls, were carried safely through the water.”
The Bible uses the word “soul” in many other ways. Genesis 9:5 says: “Your blood of your souls shall I ask back.” Here the soul is said to have blood. Exodus 12:16 says: “Only what every soul needs to eat, that alone may be done for you.” In this case the soul is said to eat. Deuteronomy 24:7 speaks of a man “kidnapping a soul of his brothers.” Surely it was not an immortal soul that was kidnapped. Psalm 119:28 says: “My soul has been sleepless from grief.” So the soul can even lose sleep. The Bible also shows that the soul is mortal. It dies. “That soul must be cut off from his people.” (Leviticus 7:20) “He may not come toward any dead soul.” (Numbers 6:6) “Our souls are to die.” (Joshua 2:14) “Any soul that does not listen to that Prophet will be completely destroyed.” (Acts 3:23) “Every living soul died.”—Revelation 16:3.
Clearly, the Bible’s use of nephesh and psykhe shows that the soul is the person or, in the case of animals, the creature. It is not some immortal part of an individual. Indeed, nephesh is even used of God himself: “Anyone loving violence His soul certainly hates.”—Psalm 11:5.

Part 4:

Many Scholars Agree

Many scholars agree that the Bible does not speak of an immortal soul. The Concise Jewish Encyclopedia states: “The Bible does not state a doctrine of the immortality of the soul, nor does this clearly emerge in early rabbinical literature.” The Jewish Encyclopedia says: “The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly nowhere expressly taught in Holy Scripture.” The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible notes: “The nephesh . . . does not continue to exist independently of the body, but dies with it. . . . No biblical text authorizes the statement that the ‘soul’ is separated from the body at the moment of death.”
Also, the Expository Dictionary of Bible Words says: “‘Soul’ in the O[ld] T[estament], then, does not indicate some immaterial part of human beings that continues after death. [Nephesh] essentially means life as it is uniquely experienced by personal beings. . . . The basic meaning of [psykhe] is established by its O[ld] T[estament] counterpart, rather than its meaning in Greek culture.” And The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary states that in the Bible, the word soul “does not designate a part of a human being, but rather the whole person. . . . In this sense human beings do not have souls—they are souls.”—Italics ours.
Even the New Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges: “The Biblical words for soul usually mean total person.” It adds: “There is no dichotomy [division] of body and soul in the O[ld] T[estament]. . . . The term [nephesh], though translated by our word soul, never means soul as distinct from the body or the individual person. . . . The term [psykhe] is the N[ew] T[estament] word corresponding with [nephesh]. . . . The notion of the soul surviving after death is not readily discernible in the Bible.” And Georges Auzou, French Catholic Professor of Sacred Scripture, writes in his book La Parole de Dieu (The Word of God): “The concept of ‘soul,’ meaning a purely spiritual, immaterial reality, separate from the ‘body,’ . . . does not exist in the Bible.”
Thus, The Encyclopedia Americana observes: “The Old Testament concept of man is that of a unity, not a union of soul and body. Although the Hebrew word [nephesh] is frequently translated as ‘soul,’ it would be inaccurate to read into it a Greek meaning. . . . [Nephesh] is never conceived of as operating separately from the body. In the New Testament the Greek word [psykhe] is often translated as ‘soul’ but again should not be readily understood to have the meaning the word had for the Greek philosophers. . . . The Bible does not provide a clear description of how a person survives after death.” It adds: “Theologians have had to resort to the discussions of philosophers for an adequate means of describing survival of the individual after death.”

Part 5:

Not the Bible but Philosophy

It is true that theologians adopted the ideas of pagan philosophers to formulate the immortal-soul doctrine. The French Dictionnaire Encyclopédique de la Bible (Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Bible) says: “The concept of immortality is a product of Greek thinking.” The Jewish Encyclopedia affirms: “The belief in the immortality of the soul came to the Jews from contact with Greek thought and chiefly through the philosophy of Plato, its principal exponent,” who lived in the fourth century before Christ. Plato believed: “The soul is immortal and imperishable, and our souls will truly exist in another world!”—The Dialogues of Plato.
When did this pagan philosophy infiltrate Christianity? The New Encyclopædia Britannica says: “From the middle of the 2nd century AD Christians who had some training in Greek philosophy began to feel the need to express their faith in its terms, both for their own intellectual satisfaction and in order to convert educated pagans. The philosophy that suited them best was Platonism.” So, as the Britannica says, “the early Christian philosophers adopted the Greek concept of the soul’s immortality.” Even Pope John Paul II acknowledged that the immortal-soul doctrine incorporates “theories of certain schools of Greek philosophy.” But accepting theories of Greek philosophy meant that Christendom had abandoned the simple truth expressed at Genesis 2:7: “Man came to be a living soul.”
The immortal-soul teaching, however, goes back much further than Plato. In the book The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, by Morris Jastrow, we read: “The problem of immortality . . . engaged the serious attention of the Babylonian theologians. . . . Death was a passage to another kind of life.” Also, the book Egyptian Religion, by Siegfried Morenz, states: “The early Egyptians regarded life after death simply as a continuation of life on earth.” The Jewish Encyclopedia notes the connection with these ancient religions and Plato when it says that Plato was led to the immortal-soul idea “through Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries in which Babylonian and Egyptian views were strangely blended.”
Thus, the immortal-soul idea is ancient. In fact, its roots go back to the dawn of human history! After Adam was told that he would die if he disobeyed God, an opposite view was expressed to Adam’s wife, Eve. She was told: “You positively will not die.” Here the seeds of the immortal-soul doctrine were sown. And ever since then, one culture after another has adopted the pagan view that ‘you will not really die but will continue to live on.’ This includes Christendom, which took its followers into apostasy in opposition to God’s purposes and will.—Genesis 3:1-5; Matthew 7:15-23; 13:36-43; Acts 20:29, 30; 2 Thessalonians 2:3, 7.
Who was it that led humans to believe that lie? Jesus identified him when he said to the religious leaders of his day: “You are from your father the Devil, and you wish to do the desires of your father. . . . When he speaks the lie, he speaks according to his own disposition, because he is a liar and the father of the lie.” (John 8:44) Yes, it is Satan who developed the immortal-soul idea to turn people away from true worship. So one’s course of life and hope for the future are put on the wrong path by believing doctrines that grew out of the first lie recorded in the Bible, though at that time Eve no doubt understood the serpent to mean merely that she would not die at all in the flesh.
The Bible does not teach that humans have an immortal soul.

Christ told us all we need to know about the soul.
1. Man can kill the body but not the soul.
2. God can kill both body and soul.

From that it is evident that body and soul are two separate and distinct parts of a human being and that the soul lives on after the death of the body. Where the soul goes after the body dies is of no consequence, but Christ did give a story called the Rich man and Lazarus to illustrate one possible scenario.

I would advise people who are interested in their salvation to be on the look out for false teachings of all the organised religions .. from Catholics to JWs. They all have their share of false teachings.

The only truth is from the teachings of Christ.

Originally posted by Rajk999
Christ told us all we need to know about the soul.
1. Man can kill the body but not the soul.
2. God can kill both body and soul.

From that it is evident that body and soul are two separate and distinct parts of a human being and that the soul lives on after the death of the body. Where the soul goes after the body dies is of no consequence, but Christ ...[text shortened]... They all have their share of false teachings.

The only truth is from the teachings of Christ.

Originally posted by galveston75
Can you prove to me that the soul lives on after death from the Bible?

Originally posted by Rajk999
I did not say that the soul lives on after death.
I said that the soul lives on after the death of the body.

Christ said that ..

Mat 10:28 And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.

Someone can kill the body but not able to kill the soul.

Clearly the soul will live on. A simple statement by Christ. Are you going to twist it?

Examples of the use of the Greek psykhe to mean “life as a creature” may be found at Matthew 6:25; 10:39; 16:25, 26; Luke 12:20; John 10:11, 15; 13:37, 38; 15:13; Acts 20:10. Since God’s servants have the hope of a resurrection in the event of death, they have the hope of living again as “souls,” or living creatures. For that reason Jesus could say that “whoever loses his soul [his life as a creature] for the sake of me and the good news will save it. Really, of what benefit is it for a man to gain the whole world and to forfeit his soul? What, really, would a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mr 8:35-37) Similarly, he stated: “He that is fond of his soul destroys it, but he that hates his soul in this world will safeguard it for everlasting life.” (Joh 12:25)
These texts, and others like them, show the correct understanding of Jesus’ words at Matthew 10:28: “Do not become fearful of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; but rather be in fear of him that can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna.” While men can kill the body, they cannot kill the person for all time, inasmuch as he lives in God’s purpose (compare Lu 20:37, 38) and God can and will restore such faithful one to life as a creature by means of a resurrection. For God’s servants, the loss of their “soul,” or life as a creature, is only temporary, not permanent.—Compare Re 12:11.

Mortal and destructible.

On the other hand, Matthew 10:28 states that God “can destroy both soul [psykhen] and body in Gehenna.” This shows that psykhe does not refer to something immortal or indestructible. There is, in fact, not one case in the entire Scriptures, Hebrew and Greek, in which the words nephesh or psykhe are modified by terms such as immortal, indestructible, imperishable, deathless, or the like.
On the other hand, there are scores of texts in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures that speak of the nephesh or psykhe (soul) as mortal and subject to death (Ge 19:19, 20; Nu 23:10; Jos 2:13, 14; Jg 5:18; 16:16, 30; 1Ki 20:31, 32; Ps 22:29; Eze 18:4, 20; Mt 2:20; 26:38; Mr 3:4; Heb 10:39; Jas 5:20); as dying, being “cut off” or destroyed (Ge 17:14; Ex 12:15; Le 7:20; 23:29; Jos 10:28-39; Ps 78:50; Eze 13:19; 22:27; Ac 3:23; Re 8:9; 16:3), whether by sword (Jos 10:37; Eze 33:6) or by suffocation (Job 7:15), or being in danger of death due to drowning (Jon 2:5); and also as going down into the pit or into Sheol (Job 33:22; Ps 89:48) or being delivered therefrom (Ps 16:10; 30:3; 49:15; Pr 23:14).

Originally posted by galveston75
No I'm not twisting anything and I hope you don't either.

So you are not saying the soul lives on after the death of the body but in the first line you say it does live on? That seems to be a confusing statement but if the soul lives on but not because of death which you say, when does it leave that human and where does it go?

Originally posted by Rajk999
You need learn to read and understand simple english.
My post was very clear.
Please read it over.

Originally posted by galveston75
I wish for once in our conversations you would drop the rudeness and have a civil and not an insulting manner from you. I'm honestly wanting to discuss this and see your view point and maybe you could see what I'm saying along with the many scriptures that do not support this thought of an immortal soul. The Bible does not contradict itself but if one goes with this belief of an immortal soul, it makes these other scriptures obsolete.

Originally posted by Rajk999
My what you call rudeness is caused by your stupidity.

Here is a perfect example in your last post. Did I ever say that the soul is immortal?

I clearly said that the soul can die. This means that it is NOT IMMORTAL.

But as Christ said only GOD can kill the soul.

You are a difficult person to talk to becuase you dont read what people write.
Read first.
Think next.
Take your time and respond .

Originally posted by galveston75
Sorry but I did miss that. But I'll not respond to you if you continue to refuse to show any respect for me as a person. I've told you and others before I have bad eyes and it's easy for me to misread the post here..........