In the story of Jesus in the wilderness, there may be seen a symbolic connection to the history of Israel being 40 years in the wilderness.
We might also see a potential connection to the sects and ‘puritans’ that lived in the wilderness during that time - John the Baptist, Essenes and probably others.
Fasting 40 days is close to the upper limit of what a human can fast without damage to the body. The hunger Jesus felt at the end of the period was not just feeling hungry. At that point, the body probably used muscle tissue for survival and that causes symptoms.
I know people who have fasted 40 days and they tell that you should not do it without a good reason.
For Jesus, it was part of the preparation to his public role. In that sense, being alone in the wilderness is a believable story. The number 40 seems to have a numerological importance in the biblical texts, so whether it was exactly 40 days or some other long time period is probably not a crucial point, except in a symbolic meaning.
Our present day Detection Instruments still cannot measure the Soul/Spirit when Our Body ceases to Function as it leaves the Body. I surmise it has to be a form of Energy, if You believe the death of Jesus statement is true. Energy can be Transferred as how a Transformer converts Electric and Magnetic back to Electrical and some by-product of Heat Energy.
Einstein equation E=MC^2 indicates Energy and Matter are interchangeable. The Bible Story of Lot’s Wife infers Her Spirit Energy Turned into matter(salt) and was not transferred to anywhere, she Perished.
Until We can make an Instrument to measure Our Spirit’s Existance, all We have is a Belief in Our minds of the Stories in The Holy Bible are true. When Our Body ceases to Function We can be transfered to somewhere else or Perish.
There are stories in The Holy Bible that are certainly Scientifically Questionable, like walking on water, multiplying fish in a basket, water into Wine? These occurrences are also a Question of Our Belief in Miracles which should control Our Behavior if We want the Miracle of Eternal Life.
My only truth is I know I have the given ability to Pray which proves I Believe in Miracles.
I occurs to me that the two meanings of “physical,” one as bodily and the other as natural has relevance in this context of physicalism and dual aspect monism. Because I do not believe the mind is just part of or a function of the brain/body. I just believe the mind is physical in the sense of natural, i.e. according to the laws of nature of the physical universe.
So what is the mind? It is a living organism (a self-organizing dynamic process) in a different medium from the biological – not organic chemistry but human language. It is my argument that human language has sufficient coding/representation capabilities to rival DNA, demonstrated by our ability to explain the operation of DNA with human language. Thus the mind has a completely a different way of passing information/inheritance to the next generation. And the human mind evolves much much faster than biology (at an accelerating rate) because of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
In a way this is a middle ground between physicalism and dualism. Because the mind being spoken of is not material in the usual sense of a solid object. But neither is it some woo-woo supernatural thing either. One of the newer trends in physics is to understand and analyze things in the universe according to information rather than material. To be sure, this is not information apart from space-time measurable things like energy. And likewise, I am not talking about a mind existing apart from the substance of the body either. But consider, this is really par for the course in all living organisms which are all very dependent on a proper environment in which they can exist and function.
And thus the mind is something which dies and ceases to function, much the same as the body, and not something which travels somewhere else when the body dies. But this doesn’t mean we need not believe in something to reality apart from the space-time physical universe. And thus I believe in a resurrection to a spiritual body as spoken of by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15. So no, I do not believe in some supernatural thing which resides in the body to make it alive and a person. But I do believe in a spiritual reality outside space and time in which a spiritual body grows from the choices of our physical body (and mind).
It’s called “recapitulation” and there was a strain of thinking in Second-Temple Judaism that the life of the Messiah would echo the history of Israel. One strand of that held that it worked the other way around, that the history of Israel was a shadow of the life that Messiah must live to redeem Israel and the world. I recall a reading where a rabbi argued that Messiah would have to suffer because Israel had not fulfilled its calling/vocation to the nations so Messiah would have to do that and it would exact a terrible price. One of the church Fathers may have picked up on this when he wrote that history by its nature must be “cross-shaped” because the Cross was the fact on which history was founded.
That idea stuck with me and I have to say it makes a lot of sense out of more than a few things in the New Testament.
I knew a guy a year behind me in college who did a 40-day fast. He followed an ancient tradition under which Sunday couldn’t be a full fast, so each Sunday morning he had fruit juice and tea and a small slice of cheese. His fast went on longer than 40 days because Sundays didn’t count.
He was in superb physical condition and got a full medical checkup before starting; the doctor insisted he have at least some protein once a week. I don’t remember the reason for his fast; what stuck with me was that during the times when the rest of us were at meals he worked at memorizing parts of the New Testament, in Greek.
What really garnered him respect was that he continued to do swim and running workouts (by the end of the fast he was ridiculously low in body fat).
Can you cite sources? Most of what you wrote represents apostolic and Patristic Christian views. Admittedly they are drawing on 2nd temple expectations that the Messiah would embody Israel’s history. But some of what you wrote seems true and some does not. Justin and Irenaeus certainly seem to fit the cross shaped history part of the bill. I asked AI it knew any sources for your rabbi. It did not:
2. The “Rabbi” and Israel’s Failed Vocation
The Verdict: This is likely a misattribution. The idea perfectly describes modern Pauline scholarship, not an ancient rabbinic text. The quote claims a rabbi argued the Messiah must suffer because Israel failed its “vocation to the nations,” so the Messiah had to pay a terrible price to fulfill it vicariously. It is highly unlikely an ancient rabbi said this. In traditional Rabbinic Judaism (particularly after the birth of Christianity), the dominant view of the “Suffering Servant” in Isaiah 53 is that the servant is the nation of Israel itself, suffering among the Gentile nations—not a Messiah suffering because of Israel. While the Talmud does contain traditions of a suffering Messiah (such as the “leper scholar” in Sanhedrin 98a who suffers for the sins of his generation), it doesn’t frame it around Israel “failing its vocation to the nations.” Instead, that specific framing—that Israel was called to be a light to the world, failed, and therefore the Messiah had to step in as a one-man Israel to suffer and fulfill that vocation—is the central thesis of the famous modern New Testament scholar and Anglican bishop N.T. Wright. Whoever wrote the quote you are remembering has likely conflated Wright’s historical reconstruction of the Apostle Paul’s theology with an ancient rabbinic source.
It seems to think you are confusing NT Wright and modern Pauline scholarship with 2nd Tempe Judaism.
I don’t know enough about Wright to make such a confusion, nor really about modern Pauline scholarship; I didn’t know either of these proposed the idea. But this is just a memory from grad school, so I have no idea for sources.
These are all interesting thoughts. Thank you all for your contributions!
I have come across another implication of physicalism, and it’s troubled me as well (seeing as how none of us are dead at the time of my typing this, and therefore can’t report back, lol): What would continuity of consciousness be like, if there was continuity, upon the creation of a new spiritual body? If we are (or are dependent upon) our brain for our identity and first person experience, will a spiritual body/brain be another version of us, but not an entity with which we will still have a first-person experience? Will it exist with all my memories and personality quirks and temperaments, but without me? I’ve seen Peter van Inwagen talk about this (https://www.allisonkrilethornton.com/wp-content/uploads/GSHNreadings/van-Inwagen-Resurrection.pdf), but I wondered what you all thought about it.
In scifi, it’s akin to the Star Trek transporter paradox, which itself has a connection to the Ship of Theseus problem. And the ship question is nicely illustrated and reworked as ‘the axe riddle’ in this clip from the movie, “John Dies at the End”
