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the Bible are shocked to discover that in the Bible the whole man dies and goes into unconscious-
ness ("sleep") and is returned to life only by the future resurrection of the whole person. Tradi-
tional Christianity persists with the mistaken notion that man has an "immortal soul" which
survives death. Many Bible readers have not paid attention to the statement of the Interpreters
Dictionary of the Bible:

"No biblical text authorizes the statement that the soul is separated from the body at the
moment of death" (Vol. 1, p. 802.).

The notion that Jesus was really alive and conscious before his birth in Bethlehem is also a
very unJewish idea. Human beings in Hebrew thought do not exist consciously before they are
born. The pre-existence of souls belongs to the world of Greek philosophy and was held by some
church fathers (notably the philosophically- and mystically-minded Origen). But they did not de-
rive this idea from the Bible.

Part of repentance is the willingness to admit we have been deceived, that we have not had
sufficient information to make good decisions on Bible issues.

One most important fact we need to know before we attempt to understand who Jesus was
is this:

"When the Jew said something was 'predestined,' he thought of it as already 'existing' in a
higher sphere of life. The world's history is thus predestined because it is already, in a
sense, pre-existing and consequently fixed. This typically Jewish conception of predesti-
nation may be distinguished from the Greek idea of pre-existence by the predominance
of the thought of 'pre-existence' in the Divine purpose" (E.C. Dewick, Primitive Chris-
tian Eschatology, The Hulsean Prize Essay for 1908, Cambridge University Press,
1912, pp. 253, 254.).

Our Scholar goes on to tell us that this typical mode of Jewish thought is clearly illustrated
in 1 Peter. This reminds us immediately that Peter did not abandon his Jewish ways of thinking
(based on the Hebrew Bible) when he became a Christian. Peter's letter is addressed to "the elect
according to the foreknowledge (prognosis) of God the Father" (1 Peter 1:1, 2). Peter believed
that all Christians were foreknown, but that did not mean that we all preexisted!

Peter's doctrine of future things is permeated by the same thought that all is foreordained in
God's great Plan. God sees everything laid out before Him. Those who have the gift of the spirit
will share God's outlook and in faith recognize that the realities of God's plan will in the future be-
come realities on earth. According to Peter the Messiah himself was foreknown, not just his death
for our sins but the person Messiah himself (1 Peter 1:20). Peter uses the same word to describe
the "existence" of the Son of God in God's plan as he did to describe the "existence" of the Chris-
tian church (verse 2).

Though the Messiah was foreknown (not known, but foreknown, as was Jeremiah the
prophet before his birth, Jeremiah 1:5), he was manifested by being brought into actual existence at

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