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Q u i c k Q u e s t i o n s
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 9
 September 1994 
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ARE MAN'S SOUL AND SPIRIT DISTINCT?
Q: I have always been taught that a person's soul and his
spirit are the same thing, but in some passages Paul seems to distinguish
the two from each other. What is going on in these cases?
A: The terms "soul" and "spirit" are used
in different senses in the Bible (Catechism of the Catholic Church
363). Genesis 2:7 states that God formed man's body from the ground,
breathed into him the breath (spirit) of life, and so "man became
a living soul" (literal translation). Here the term "soul"
is used to refer to the whole man, composed of both body and spirit.
The same use is found when we describe a shipwreck and say things
like "70 souls were lost," meaning 70 people died.
A different use is found in Revelation 6:9 and 20:4, where John sees
the souls of those who have been slain for the gospel. Here "soul"
obviously does not refer to the whole, embodied person, but to the
immaterial part, the spirit, that survives death.
In two Bible verses (1 Thess. 5:23 and Heb. 4:12) "soul"
and "spirit" seem to be used in distinct senses, but this
does not prove the existence of two immaterial substances
in man. The authors use Hebrew parallelism for poetic effect; they
are not talking about constituent parts of man.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church also sheds light
on this issue: "Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the
spirit . . . The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce
a duality into the soul. 'Spirit' signifies that from creation man
is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can graciously
be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God" (CCC
367).
Q: A friend of mine says she was baptized a Catholic when
she was an infant, then rebaptized when her family became Baptists.
What does rebaptism do, if anything?
A: If a person's initial baptism was valid, rebaptism does
nothing to improve the state of the soul before God. Any valid baptism
imprints a spiritual mark or character on the recipient's soul. This
mark cannot be destroyed or removed, so baptism can never be repeated.
Any subsequent attempts at baptism will be invalid. They are at least
materially an insult to the Holy Spirit, because they imply that what
the Spirit did in the initial baptism was not sufficient. Usually,
though, a person who receives a "second baptism" is not
formally guilty of insulting the Holy Spirit since he has been mistaught
concerning the efficacy of his initial baptism.
Because of the invalidity of subsequent baptisms and the danger of
insulting the Holy Spirit (even materially), the Church is reluctant
to apply the rite of baptism to a person who already has been baptized
in a non-Catholic sect. Only if there is some reason to doubt the
person's initial baptism does the Church apply the rite of baptism
to him--and then it does so conditionally. A conditional baptism
has the form, "[Name], if you were not already baptized, I baptize
you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."
This leaves the question of whether the person's original baptism
was valid up to God, and it shows that the Church never rebaptizes
people baptized outside the Church.
Rebaptism into a Protestant sect does do one thing: It changes a person's
status under canon law. It is generally taken as a formal declaration
that one has left the Catholic Church. People who make formal declarations
are exempt from certain obligations they acquired as Catholics. Canons
1086 and 1117 exempt those who have defected from the Church by formal
act from the disparity of cult impediment to marriage and from the
need to observe the Catholic form of marriage (marriage in front of
a Catholic priest or deacon, with two official witnesses). Formal
defectors are not exempt from other marriage impediments (lack of
age, physical impotence, or prior marriage bonds), nor are they exempt
from other ecclesiastical obligations they assumed as Catholics (see
Coriden, Green, and Heintschel, The Code of Canon Law, A Text
and Commentary, 129).
Q: I recently watched a debate between a Christian and a
Muslim. The latter said there were contradictions in the Bible and
gave as an example a passage saying Solomon had 4,000 horse stalls
and another passage saying he had 40,000. What should I make of this?
A: Don't make a mountain out of it. The passages you refer
to are 2 Chronicles 9:25, which says Solomon had 4,000 stalls for
horses, and 1 Kings 4:26, which in some translations says he had 40,000
of them (this latter verse is numbered 1Kings 5:6 in the New American
Bible). Those translations which give the number 40,000 are based
on the Masoretic Text, the Old Testament used by Jews in the Middle
Ages. But if one checks the Septuagint (LXX), one discovers manuscripts
giving the number 4,000--the same as in 2 Chronicles 9:25.
What we have here is a classic example of a copyist error. Before
the printing press, each copy of the Bible had to be produced by hand
from a previous copy. Though the scribes doing the copying were amazingly
meticulous in their efforts, occasionally a scribe would get sleepy
or lose his concentration or mishear a word in the text as it was
being read aloud, and he would make a mistake. These tiny mistakes
are called copyist errors, and they were dangerous because, if not
caught, they would be passed on to future copies made from this scribe's
work.
The Hebrew word for forty is only two strokes of a pen different from
the word for four. What probably happened in the case of 1 Kings 4:26
is that some early scribe became sleepy and accidentally added those
two strokes to the word he was writing. No one caught the error. His
manuscript became the basis for the Masoretic Text. The true form
of the text was preserved in the LXX manuscript tradition (the LXX
being an early Greek translation of the Old Testament), which is used
for this verse by almost all modern Bibles.
The fact we have a copyist error in this case has been known for a
long time. For example, Keil & Delitzsch's Commentary on the Old
Testament, first published in the mid-1800s, states: "Arba'iym
(40) is an old copyist's error for arba'ah (4), which we find
in the parallel passage, 2 Chronicles 9:25, and as we may also infer
from chapter 10:26 and 2 Chronicles 1:14, since according to these
passages Solomon had 1,400 rekeb or war chariots. For 4,000
horses are a very suitable number for 1,400 chariots, though not 40,000,
since two draught horses were required for every war chariot, and
one horse may have been kept as a reserve" (Commentary on
the Old Testament 3:53).
Generally, numerical discrepancies are trivial in their solution and
are obvious to scholars. John Haley's classic work, Alleged Discrepancies
of the Bible, states, "We have previously, more than once,
called attention to the marked resemblance of Hebrew letters to one
another; also to the fact . . . that these letters were in ancient
time employed to represent numbers. These two facts indicate at once
the cause and the solution of the numerical discrepancies" (Alleged
Discrepancies, 380).
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