‘The Sanctuary of his Body’: Body and Sanctuary in Paul and John

Abstract

This article explores the possibility that John’s reference to ‘the sanctuary of his body’ (2.19) may have been influenced by Paul’s images of the church as Christ’s body and as a sanctuary. Paul describes both the church (1 Cor. 6.16) and the bodies of individual Christians (6.19) as sanctuaries of the Holy Spirit. Similarly, he describes Christians as ‘limbs of the body of Christ’ (12.17) and ‘limbs of Christ’ (6.15). The question arises as to whether the two images are related. Discussing his own mortality (2 Cor. 4–5), Paul uses imagery connected with the sanctuary – ‘tent’, and ‘a house not made with hands’ (a possible dominical saying); he then reminds the Corinthian church of their calling to fulfil Israel’s mission to be ‘the sanctuary of the living God’ (ch. 6). Elsewhere, the work of the Spirit is vital for the church, whether described as ‘body’ or as ‘sanctuary’. Paul seems to have linked the two ideas, and John may have been aware of this when he used the phrase ‘the sanctuary of his body’.