What is the flesh?

Abarim Publications' online Biblical Greek Dictionary

σαρξ

• The adjective σαρκικος (sarkikos), meaning fleshly in the sense of pertaining to the flesh or in the way of the flesh. But, as noted above and discussed below, the Bible's idea of "flesh" corresponds much rather to our modern idea of consciousness than the atoms and fibers of our muscular physique. The way of the flesh is that mental quality that we humans share with other conscious animals (mammals, birds): continuously wanting to eat and copulate and protect ourselves. This adjective is used 11 times; see full concordance.
• The adjective σαρκινος (sarkinos), meaning fleshy in the sense of being made out of flesh. This word occurs in 2 Corinthians 3:3 only, which speaks of a letter of Christ written "not on stone tables, but on fleshy tables of heart", which obviously speaks of one's mental consciousness and not of one's physical blood pump.

Long ago, in a galaxy far away

Under emperors Darius and Xerxes, the Persian Empire had become vastly diverse and multicultural. Ultimately, the Jews would come to dominate Persia's wisdom class — according to Daniel and Ezra, Jews would become the emperor's most useful ministers, and their wisdom schools developed modern information technology (see our article on YHWH) and invented the postal service of which the modern Internet is the latest installment. The magi of whom Matthew tells (Matthew 2:1), who realized that the Messiah had come way ahead of everyone else, were such Persian Jews. But long before they could prove their usefulness, the Jews were proverbially known for not fitting in. In those days, queerness did not sit well with everybody.

In the early days of their exile, the Jews were violently persecuted by Haman and friends, who demanded normalcy and assimilation, which by itself was not an unreasonable demand but one that was impossible for most of the Jews to comply with. Contrary to common perception, Jews don't like to be tormented, and whoever could hide their queerness would certainly do so. Only Jews who had no way of hiding it, were recognized as Jews. And certainly nobody who was not a Jew would pretend to be one.

As Esther tells, Haman's plot was foiled, and the Jews were accepted as a minority normalcy. Not long after, the emperor decided that the Jews should have their own country, and there rebuild their magnificent temple. And so he lavished them with funds, workers and soldiers to protect them while they basked in the glow of imperial glory (Ezra 6:1-12). Suddenly a host of folks emerged from all over the empire, loudly claiming that they, in fact, were also Jews, and had been all along! They had no real means of proving it, and so they began to dress more Jewish than the Jews, and speak more Jewish than Jews, and became living caricatures of what they thought Jewishness was all about. The actual Jews didn't buy it, of course, but the world began to understand Jewishness according to the ever loud and flamboyant testimonies of the wannabees (Ezra 4:1-5).

It took the world a while to understand that genuine Jewishness is proven via ancestry, and quite a while longer to understand what that precisely meant (and how fake ancestries are easily recognized). But ultimately, the wave of false Jewishness petered out, and the wannabees went on to pursue other things. The genuine Jews created their realm, which became a kingdom, which fell to the Romans and gave rise to the Messiah. And, as might be guessed, there was something deeply queer about all that.

Dance around the world (all you boys and girls)

Contrary to common intuition, our word σαρξ (sarx) mostly describes an aspect of the mind rather than the material body: it much rather means "consciousness" than "material body". Our word σαρξ (sarx) is Greek, but its use in the New Testament is Hebrew. The Hebrew word for flesh is בשר (basar), which stems from the identical verb בשר (basar), which means to bring glad tidings (tidings of comfort and joy). To the Hebrews, all flesh was an expression of joy: a mental thing much rather than a physical thing.

The Greeks, especially after Plato, saw the body as the rigid vessel in which the fluidic soul sloshes like red wine (the fluidic soul) in a glass (the rigid body). The Hebrews, to the contrary, did not see the soul separate from the body, but saw the body as the loose dust that settles according to the shape dictated by the soul. To the Hebrews, the body is the fluidic red wine that shows the shape of the invisible solid glass that is the soul: red wine (the fluidic body) in a glass (the rigid soul).

The Bible, including the Greek New Testament, looks at things in the Hebrew way, and therefore regards the body as expression of the mind rather than the mind an expression of the body. Furthermore, consciousness is a matter of categorical and thus algorithmic (lawful) thought, and the different sorts of "flesh" of humans, animals and birds (1 Corinthians 15:39) was a legal matter much rather than an physical matter, a matter of intelligent definition (and all language is social consensus: whatever many people call a thing, that is its name) much rather than measurable quantities (such as chromosomes).

Humans eat (absorption of physical matter) and humans sense (absorption of information), and they do both things with their bodies. The prophet Isaiah declared that one day "the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and all flesh will see it together," which obviously does not describe an instance of absorption of physical matter but rather an absorption of information: it's a mental thing, and thus algorithmic and thus lawful and describes something that feeds all the world's conscious minds rather than all the world's organic bodies.

Likewise, when Jesus asserts that "the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41), he is not talking about the physical limitations of one's body but rather of the mental limitations of one's awareness.

The Torah dictates that husband and wife are to be one "flesh" (Genesis 2:24), and while the act of eating certainly unifies the eater with her food, the act of copulation does not make husband and wife a Siamese twin. Instead, husband and wife are to form a conjoined conscious mind — not only while physically joined but all the time, and not like two drops of water that become one bigger drop but like two processors that align their protocols and definitions so as to form a unified network with two autonomous nodes. That means that even within the human arena, there are at least three different kinds of human flesh: male, female and married couples.

This in turn suggests that marriage (γαμος, gamos, marriage) is self-similar to nuclear fusion. And this in tun suggests that the world of the familiar three kinds of human flesh that the Bible talks about (boys, girls, married couples), corresponds to the early universe of hydrogen and helium, which was only the beginning of a much larger universe peopled by an entire periodic table of possible flesh (Matthew 22:30).

Normalcy is a wonderful thing, but as Darius and Xerxes realized, only yields business as usual. Stagnation is every emperor's worst nightmare, because innovation is inevitable (Daniel 2:36). But an emperor may harness innovation by allowing its schizotypal agents to gather and build whatever they will. And the emperor might imagine that he's doing it all (Daniel 4:30), but in fact he is like any other beast that instinctively follows the natural laws that are engrained in every atom in the universe. All creatures grow but sometimes, inevitable innovation lies beyond the reach of gradual evolution, and one normalcy must make way for another one in a punctuated equilibrium sort of way: the way a creature is first surprised, then surpassed and finally replaced by its own offspring.

And the Virgin will be with Child

Human flesh consists of a physical part that requires food and a mental part that requires information. In classical societies, the job of the mother is to provide a child with the food for its physical part, whereas the job of the father is to provide the child with information for its mental part. The mother builds (and that starts at conception), and the father instructs (and that starts at birth playfully but gets serious in childhood). But, crucially, conception happens when the father asserts his will and endows the mother with a one-time instruction that sets the whole cycle in motion. After that first burst of expression of the father's will, the child grows as an integrated part of the mother and has no contact with the father. Contact with the father is only restored at birth. And training for unsupervised leadership of the father's house starts when the child is about twelve.

Jesus, famously, came about without the "will" of a man, which means that his human genes came solely from Mary, who only had Levite X-chromosomes to share (Mary was a close kin of Elizabeth: Luke 1:36, who was of the daughters of Aaron: Luke 1:5).

This means that genetically, Jesus was a Levite female; a perfect daughterly clone of mother Mary.

We obviously think of Jesus as a Jewish male rather than the Levite female he was genetically, but that is only because both Jewishness and maleness are legal terms, neither physical qualities that can be observed (of clothes and hairdo), nor mental qualities that can be derived from one's temperament and behavior (of the flesh). Instead, Jewishness and masculinity are legal terms, which are described by law, which derives from social and collective consensus. In the words of Paul: "For he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, nor is circumcision that which is outward in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is that which is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; and his praise is not from men, but from God" (Romans 2:28-29). Jesus was not only a Jewish male according to his garb, his behavior and his consciousness, but also (and crucially so) his subconsciousness and the subconsciousness of his society at large.

Jesus was a son of Joseph of Eli of Judah and he was that by law (Luke 3:23). The verb used here is νομιζω (nomizo), to legalize, to make so as per law, from νομος (nomos), meaning law. And he was a seed of David as per flesh (Romans 1:3), which is instruction-wise (fatherly), not body-wise (motherly). And he was a son of Abraham, who was long deceased body-wise (motherly), but was (and is) still quite alive instruction-wise (fatherly), as Jesus himself explains in Matthew 22:32.

Jesus was legally a man because he instructed, and an instructor does not explain himself, he explains the law. Jesus came up with new things that were nevertheless in accordance with the eternal law, and thus had real but never before seen effect (Mark 1:21-28, see Luke 4:28). A man is anybody who comes up with new and original ways of applying natural law. And a woman is anybody who substantiates the man's instructions. A woman copy-pastes and repeats and does it again. A man innovates.

The legal definition of a man is: that what instructs. And the legal definition of a woman is: that what substantiates. That is why it was said that a man is the "head" (i.e. the nucleus) of the woman, and the woman the "body" of the man (Colossians 1:18).

A man without a woman is like a king without a kingdom: someone who knows it all but can't find anyone who listens. A woman without a man is someone who draws crowds of hungry snappers but is clueless about how to guard her chops. Hyper-masculinity yearns to be incorporated (when listeners take his instructions to heart and adjust their behavior accordingly). Hyper-femininity yearns to be sorted (for someone to render structure to her package, give her identity and thus create separation between her and the world).

The dream of every boy is to find a girl who substantiates his every wish to the last unwritten detail, but every man understands that woman is the event horizon of man and the asymptote of his will. The dream of every girl is to find a boy who encloses her in perfect safety, but every woman understands that man is the bottom of a bottomless pit and the asymptote of her desire. Physically, we humans are obviously either man or woman. But mentally we, equally obviously, exist somewhere in between.

Largely influenced by their genetic dispositions and society's reaction to those, all kids start their mental life as either mostly male or mostly female, and the entire secret to mental maturity and a healthy and happy mental existence is to draw from the opposite pool and attain the mental flesh of a "married couple": with a playful balance between one's own identifying structure (male) and one's vibrant social skills (female).

If a creative reader would imagine Mary not as a single human female but rather as a human collective — in the same way that Paul mentions "mother" Jerusalem (Galatians 4:26), and Isaiah speaks of the Virgin to be with Child (Isaiah 7:14), which everybody in his original audience would have equated with the Virgin Athena, the celebrated city-builder; see our article on παρθενος (parthenos), virgin — then each of Mary's body cells would represent a male person ("sons of Jerusalem" as mentioned in Joel 3:6), and Jesus was a gamete: an ovum. His crucifixion was his ovulation. His resurrection was the conception. And the Body of Christ (or Ecclesia) grows like a baby within the womb. Ecclesia's birth corresponds to the so-called Second Coming (and see our article on Stephen for a more detailed look at this).

Today, Jesus is incarnate in his people, which is Ecclesia, which is feminine and plural. That means that although Jesus is legally a Jewish male individual (pronoun "he"), emotionally, Jesus is a Levite female (pronoun "they").

Who identifies who?

The Great Commandment demands that we understand both God's Word and the concerns of our fellow humans (Matthew 22:36-40). Both are unfathomably complex, which suggests that an attitude of simplicity in these matters demonstrates a willful aversion to either. The most baffling event in mankind's history is Jesus' death on the cross, by which he fulfilled all righteousness. Besides everything else, this event demonstrates that righteousness is certainly not simple. And although laughing and mocking is part of the natural reflex of the soldiers who continue to hammer the nails into Jesus' flesh, anyone who aspires to be like Christ can be recognized solely by their willingness to die for other people's sins.

When Moses asked God: "Who am I?", God answered: "I AM with you" (Exodus 3:11-12). When Moses asked God: "Who are you?", God answered "I AM who I AM" (Exodus 3:11-15). Jesus asked his disciples: "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they gave the names of major prophets. Then he asked "But who do you say that I AM?" And Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matthew 13:17).

Because language is always a communal thing, identity is always a communal thing. A word is the same as a name: whatever people collectively call a thing, that will be its name.

Here at Abarim Publications we would like to contribute that the identity of a human individual is a ratio, namely the ratio between one's genetic constitution and society's sense of collective self. All conscious thought depends on words, and our human society thinks in words (English words) that centuries ago crystalized in a world (the Indo-European world) where one's bodily abilities determined the spectrum of what one could become. Today, we are very rapidly entering a world that is wholly data-driven, and we mostly communicate with people (on phones, online, via books, via art), whose genetic constitution is not a thing that can be observed in any scientifically meaningful way. That means that in the old days, genders (plus their obvious definitions and functions) were in everybody's face. Today, genders are drifting out of our direct scope, and are becoming rather like the angels: both denied and believed in, debated and speculated about.

Over the course of the next few decades, a very large portion of humanity will enter the Metaverse. There individuals will interact with their world via avatars, and their physical bodies (or physical "root") will be entirely invisible and irrelevant. They will overcome their tiresome obsession with copulation. The gender aspect of their language will atrophy in the same way that the grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, and so on) have atrophied.

But not everybody will make their permanent home in the Metaverse. The Metaverse is really a natural continuation of the Internet, which in turn grew naturally out of the postal service. That means that the crowd that will people the Metaverse is really the parent, whereas the small group of people that will somehow remain connected to the natural world is the child. The difference is that in the Metaverse, players get to make up their own rules, and create their own realities and may impose their wishes upon the environment at large. The child-group will consist of people who continue to derive their individual identity from the reflections of the community, rather than the other way around. The Metaverse will evolve into a genderless and sexless code-based swirl of individual realities. The child-group will become a new biological species: a creature that has a mind that is as different from our present minds the way a multi-cellular organism differs from a single cellular one.

Humanity started out in a body-driven world, which is a feminine and maternal world. And we are transitioning into an instruction-driven (i.e. either natural law or Metaverse law) world, which is a masculine and paternal world. Because our collective identity is transitioning, all our individual identities are shifting. Our entire world is changing, which is why every individual identity is changing. This shift from social childhood to social maturity is unprecedented, and it gives our generation a unique insight into the workings mankind's collective mind, which is of course mighty exiting.

The most pressing task of humanity today is to overcome the childish considerations of our Indo-European youth and get used to the mature considerations of our lawful (algorithmic, code-abiding) adulthood. Those among us who cannot make that transition from the mother-world to the father-world are not in any way less than those who can. But those of us who cannot detach from the mother-world (and this includes all sensual pleasure, emotions and opinions based on personal taste) are therefore themselves female, destined for motherhood and a reversion back to the "tent of the women". Those of us who are indeed able to detach from the mother-world and become fluent in the things of the father-world (general rules, autonomy, sovereignty), those are themselves males, destined for fatherhood (Isaiah 9:6, Revelation 21:24). Our world is presently in turmoil because these two groups are separating and each collective is calling both its natives home and out to the other side for fulfilment: the female camp is crying out for structure and governance (see MTV), whereas the male camp (government, academia, big data) knows everything except how to please a woman (the general population).

A bundle of sticks

Normal people don't appreciate how difficult it is to simply blend in for people that are not. Critics may think that if a cross-dresser would simply revert back to their original gender, they would seamlessly blend in and to all effect, simply go away. But it is obviously not that simple. Most queer people (and that includes autistic-queers and gender-queers) spend their early years feeling like Pinocchio, and try very hard to be normal, only to be rang at every turn, and made to feel like a handful of sticks. Many queers take to cross-dressing for exactly the same reason that many autistics flee abroad: to get out of the uncanny valley, to manage people's reactions and to make sure that everybody understands that they know that they don't belong, and thus don't need to be told. Sometimes emphasizing contours is the best way of blending into one's host normalcy. What a wonderful world it would be if everybody who is obviously trying to be normal would be treated as if they were (Matthew 11:17).

Many millennia ago, people believed that the observable world was governed by many gods, and that bad things could be averted by appealing to the applicable deity. Today we understand that the observable world is governed by a single, unified natural law that works everywhere in the universe the same (called Logos; compare Hebrews 1:3 to Romans 1:20). We now know that we can't avert bad happenings by removing the bad mood of some god. We can only avert bad things from learning how to work with the entirety of natural law. We now know that freedom comes from a mastery of that singular law that makes all things in the entire universe happen.

A few decades ago, many people believed that evil could be removed from society by removing specific demographics (Jews, gays, autists). Today we understand that even though society appears to comprise isolated demographics, it is really one big interconnected living mind, in which all people are connected to all other people. Our bread is baked, our houses are built, our water is purified, our world is held together by people who are all formed by all others. And so are we, and none of us gets to choose who out there gets to form us.

When DNA was first discovered, most of us thought that it would have to contain instructions on how to build any specific body part. Today we understand that our genetic constitution is like the singular law of the universe, or the singular identity of society. Our genetic code governs every single cell in our body, plus their ratio with all other cells. That means that every part of our body is accounted for in every cell of our body, not only the cells of that part but our entire body and thus our entire mind. Were we to remove that body part, then every remaining cell in our body will forever wail in lament for what was lost. (And even observers will think: if you did that to yourself, what might you do to me?)

Freedom is the most precious gift the universe has to offer (Galatians 5:1). But freedom is a skill that must be learned. Freedom is not an absence of rules but comes from the mastery of the rules that make things work: whether that is the universe, our human societies or our own bodies. Freedom only exists when everybody is free, and when nobody dominates anybody else. This is why a sane and mature society allows all adults to do whatever they want to do with their own bodies and their own minds (and whatever they want to offer for sale, and whatever they want to buy for their pleasure, so that some choose bondage where others choose freedom, and some choose life, where others choose death). And this is also why that same sane and mature society guarantees with great fortitude the right of parents to shield their own children from things that they don't want them exposed to, until their immune systems are mature enough to deal with whatever comes their way.

Freedom is crucial and paramount, because without freedom there can be no life, and this is why pro-choice outweighs pro-life. But freedom only comes from mastery, whereas anarchy and ignorance only leads to excess and bondage and death. That means that sexual freedom only comes from sexual wisdom, and pro-choice always results in pro-life.

See for a lengthier discussion on what governments can and cannot do with societies, as well as some specific contemplations on the whole gender issue, our article on Plato.

The smile: the mirror of the soul

Our noun σαρξ (sarx) survives in English in a large array of "sarco-" words, which are mostly scientific terms having to do with flesh and being fleshy. A more familiar one is sarcophagus, which literally means flesh-eating (because after a while, an inspected body would have turned into a fleshless skeleton). A more surprising sarx-derivative is the noun sarcasm, which comes from the noun σαρκασμος (sarkasmos), which means the same, and which demonstrates that even to the Greeks, our noun σαρξ (sarx) was predominantly a word that described an element of living and thus behaving and using verbal language.

This noun σαρκασμος (sarkasmos), sarcasm, derives from the rare verb σαρκαζω (sarkazo), which appears to literally mean to act "flesh-like"; to act in the manner of the flesh. In Greek literature, this verb is used to mean: to sink one's teeth into something and rip off a mouthful. This verb is used to describe dogs tearing into their prey with their teeth but also of horses ripping off grass with their lips. This in turn demonstrates that the flesh referred to by this verb is not the flesh of the victim but rather of the eater.

With our lips we kiss and speak kind words, but lips are also the organs with which we hide our most personal assault weapons: our teeth and our biting remarks. Some of us even have venom, and while sticks and stones may break bones, a carefully aimed bite from a venomous mouth may cause a wound that will never heal, and in time lead to an agonizing death. Perhaps we humans began to smile when we realized that the nature of any animal is recognized not by its size or weight or color but rather by its teeth.

Flesh is the part of the body that lets an organism engage in willful activities. Since eating and observing are in the Bible considered exactly the same process, physical flesh is the same thing as one's mental skill set, whereas one's bones are one's certainties and traditions, and one's digestive system the inner workings of one's psyche.

As we discuss more elaborately in our article on the verb διδασκω (didasko): the ancient Proto-Indo-European root dens-, means to learn/teach, whereas the closely related root dent- means tooth (hence our word dentist). Likewise, the Hebrew verb שנן (shanan) means to sharpen (of the mind, to teach) and the noun שן (shen) means tooth.

Flesh is not the opposite of the soul or spirit, as certain pagan models assert (and the much discussed "substance" of the soul is plain old electromagnetism: light). Instead, one's soul (ψυχη, psuche) is the condition of being alive, whereas one's spirit (πνευμα, pneuma) is the ability to relate and bond to others. Said most succinctly: the body is one's massive self (that which weighs something), whereas one's soul is one's animated self, and one's spirit is one's social self. Ants and bees have tiny rigid bodies but are highly spiritual creatures (Proverbs 6:6). Among mammals, spirituality beyond a pack or pod is very rare.

Mind emanates from every cell that has DNA, is rooted in every cell and cannot exist separate from the physical functioning of that cell. In other words: slugs, squirrels and paramecia have souls and minds just like ours (contrary to what translations suggest, Genesis 1:20 reads: "Let the waters swarm with swarms of living souls," and Genesis 1:24 reads: "Let the earth bring forth living souls after their kind"). The difference between animals and us is that we have the capacity for nouns (see our article on ονομα, onoma, meaning noun or name), and thus speech and thus script (see our article on γραφω, grapho, to write) and thus the Logos. All animals including humans have bodies, and thus souls (the state of being alive) and thus spirits (the ability to engage). But because of nouns, humans are vastly more spiritual than any animal out there.

In the New Testament, our noun σαρξ (sarx) almost exclusively refers to "mental flesh," that is: the function of our physical body that lets us do Sudoku; the willful "mind" that is rooted in every cell with DNA. The familiar term "flesh and blood" (Matthew 16:17) corresponds to the same duo as "matter and energy" (see our article on the verb φαω, phao, to emit) and refers to one's conscious knowledge plus one's processing nature. Human minds come in all kinds of sizes and blood types, from huge cold-blooded crocodiles to tiny warm-blooded mice, and from sleepy grass eating cows to ferocious carnivorous weasels; there are even whales and dolphins among us.

A carnivorous mind respects only himself and his own kind, and will kill and devour anything other. They are either solitary or hunt in small packs. Solely for feeding purposes, a carnivorous mind will rip the knowledge and certainties of someone else apart, until that person's mind is dead. A herbivorous mind, on the other hand, cares little about the substance of other people's facts and certainties. A herbivorous person is usually very social and eats only resources that easily replenish. These are our artists and musicians.

Cold-blooded minds need the sun to warm up and grow cold and sluggish in the night. Warm blooded minds are hot always, from their internal heat source. During times of bounty and sunny skies the difference is hard to tell, but when darkness falls and cold creeps in, the difference becomes clear indeed. Land animals share their solid ground with most other mammals. Sea mammals don't stand on solid ground but glide through worlds unknown to land dwellers. It's not that they don't want stand; they simply have no legs. Still, they too are home in their world.

As the prophet said: all "flesh" will see the salvation of God (Luke 3:6), which is of course great news for humans and pets alike, but it's doubtful that our pooch will get worked up about it. Experiencing the meaning of the salvation of God requires the nouns of a human mind. To the donkey that carried Jesus into Jerusalem, Jesus was an ordinary human. That's why the donkey never shouted Hosanna and the people did (Matthew 21:9, Zechariah 9:9).