The Church as the Body of Christ in the Pauline Corpus: A Re-examination

In discussions of the church as the body of Christ (sime Christou) within the Pauline corpus, numerous New Testament scholars have tried to come to grips with a fundamental but yet unresolved issueothe nature of the relationships between Christ via his own body and the church as body. The implicit assumption is that sime Christou as ecclesiological language does point to Christ’s once crucified but now risen body in some direct wayoeither mystically or metaphorically. This book examines exegetically that basic assumption in the light of the 18 ecclesiological references to sima and demonstrates that the expression is not a reference to Christ’s personal body, as numerous scholars assert, but that it simply has the human body (any human body) as its referent. The book maintains that Christ’s personal body, crucified and risen, becomes relevant only in a larger Christological and soteriological sense.