And Jesus answered
and said unto him, Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath
not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. (Matt 16:17)
Some believe the phrase “flesh and blood”
to be a synonym for “physical.” However, it is generally believed by New
Testament scholars that “flesh and blood” is a Semitism referring to man as a
moral being. Consider its usage in Rabbinic literature wherein it carries the
primary sense of mortality rather than physicality:
a. The description of man as “flesh and blood” is
older than Rabbinism. It is rooted in the widespread Semitic tendency to
express complex phenomena by two complementary terms. In illustration one might
refer in Old Canaanite-Ugaritic to “ruler sea” and “judge river” for water as
the ancient power of chaos, and in Hebrew to “heaven and earth” for the cosmos
(Gn. 1:1) or “waste and void” for chaos (Gn. 1:2). “Flesh and blood” as an
expression for man refers to man’s external life and also to his existence as a
living creature, which is guaranteed by blood (→ I, 173, 13 ff.) as the sap of
life. From the very outset, then, the idea of mortality and creatureliness
seems to be especially bound up with the phrase, cf. Sir. 14:18 (Heb.): “Like
the buds on a sprouting tree, of which one decays and the other opens, so are
the generations of flesh and blood; the one perishes and the other grows up.”
In the same way the Rabb. use the expression “flesh
and blood” chiefly where the corruptible nature of man—usually in a conclusion a minori ad maius—is compared with the
eternity and omnipotence of God: j Ber., 9 (13b, 1): “If he who depends on
flesh and blood (i.e., another man) is delivered, how much more he who depends
on God.” Well-known are the many royal parables in which an earthly king (מלך בשר ודם) is the counterpart of God as the heavenly
king, → 109, 27 f.
b. It
is significant for the development of Jewish anthropology, however, that the
word flesh, used alone, gives place to גּוּף, which is to be regarded as a derivate of the root gup, found in Arab. and meaning “to be
hollow.” Found in the OT only in 1 Ch. 10:12 as גּוּפָה* “corpse,”: guf
acquires an extraordinarily wide range of meaning in Middle Hebrew and Aram.,
e.g., “cavity,” “hollow place,” “body.” Hence גּוּף can mean “person,” cf. b. Qid., 37a f., where a legal religious
duty which is connected with the person and is to be discharged everywhere (חובת הגוף) is distinguished from that which is bound exclusively to
Palestine (חוכת הארץ). Like נֶפֶשׁ and בָּשָׂר in the
OT and עֶצֶם “bone” in Middle Heb. גּוּף can also be used as a pronoun: גופה של פתילה “the wick itself,” j Shab., 2 (5a, 23). (Eduard Schweizer and
Friedrich Baumgärtel, “Σάρξ, Σαρκικός, Σάρκινος,” in Gerhard Kittel, Geoffrey
W. Bromiley, and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New
Testament, Volume 7 [Grand Rapids, Mich: Eerdmans, 1964–], 116.)
Interestingly, I have seen “flesh and
blood” in Matt 16:17 as being a proof-text against Latter-day Saint theology of
divine embodiment, but such is bogus, based on eisegesis.
For a sampling of the biblical evidence for
the Latter-day Saint doctrine of the Father being embodied, see:
Lynn
Wilder vs. Latter-day Saint (and Biblical) Theology on Divine Embodiment
