@Vidqun
"as you might have noticed, I interpret the Scriptures quite literally." - I don't think so, the JW biblical "hermeneutics" is not accidentally called the "Scripture sandwich", or "knight's jump" exegesis (jumping from one place to another in the Scripture like a knight moves on a chessboard), without regard to the context of salvation history. Just as stones are extracted from a quarry, revelations are drawn from the most diverse places in the Bible and - mostly without regard to context and the circumstances of origin - are freely combined.
"On the one hand, I view the soul as a living person (or animal). Adam became a living soul when he started breathing (Gen. 2:7)." - You may have heard or read about the broad nuances of the Hebrew term "nefesh", but basically your denomination wants to derive the doctrinal description of anthropology from the earliest Old Testament meaning of the word "nefesh". Any Catholic theology book will tell you that "nefesh" in Genesis 2:7 does not mean soul, which is what we specifically mean by "soul". This meaning also appears clearly in the Bible, although it is a fact that it is mainly in the later books.
The body-soul dichotomy appears quite concretely, for example, in the first half of Matthew 10:28. In Matthew 10:28, the psyche obviously does not mean either the whole person (because it is about his physical death) or his (eternal) life, since it is not denoted by the term 'psyche', but by the term 'zōē aiōnios' in the New Testament. Read THIS.
And it remains unanswered why, if Israel's original faith was annihilationism, why the translators of the LXX translated 'sheol' as 'hades' and 'nefesh' as 'psyche', when these words clearly have an after-life meaning in the Greek language. And then the writers of the New Testament adopted this terminology and then proclaimed the Gospel in the Greco-Roman world, without saying a word about these converted pagans abandoning their faith in the after-life in its entirety, since there is supposedly nothing until the resurrection.
At that time, the Greeks understood two things by the word 'hades'. Hades, the god of the underworld, one of the sons of the god Zeus, and the realm over which the god Hades ruled, i.e. the Underworld, where, according to their belief, the souls of the dead go. This was the Greek world of faith, the Greeks believed in this. My question is: why did the Jewish translators who first translated the Hebrew scriptures into Greek translate the Hebrew sheol into 'hades'? Hehehe, good question, right? Perhaps the Watchtower-like answer could be that the translators were not inspired, and apostate copyists inserted the same words into the New Testament. I am already waiting for a 'Brand New World Translation' to be published, in which, in addition to the 237 mentions of Jehovah, the ten mentions of Sheol will finally regain their "rightful place"...
You should probably read a chapter from a book on biblical anthropology about the word "nefesh" to see that this word in the Old Testament signified throat, neck, desire, life, a complete person - and indeed the soul, in its usual theological sense. You all have a great battle against those scripture passages where the word cannot mean a complete person, because it is about a person's breath. Such are Exodus 23:9, Job 19:2, Isaiah 53:11, and many others that I could copy from my source, Hans Walter Wolff's book 'Anthropology of the Old Testament'. These cannot be pinned down to mean the "complete person", but rather a constituent part of the person. Obviously, in many places 'nefesh' means the whole person, but these do not absorb the ones I mentioned, nor several key places in the description of the soul, such as 1Thes 5:23, Hebrews 4,12. Therefore, neither nefesh nor psyche exclusively mean the complete person.
Ezekiel 18:4 - Here, the Hebrew term
'nephesh' obviously does not mean what Christian theology means by the soul, and thus by definition does not teach the death of IT. Such phrases in the Bible: "may my soul die with the death of the righteous", are Hebraisms. The Scriptures describe the origin of man not philosophically, but illustratively, and therefore attribute the נָפֶשׁ (nefesh, the principle of life manifested in warm breath) to both man and animal. The nefesh often replaces the reflexive and personal pronouns in Hebrew; thus such statements should be understood: "my soul shall die" = "I shall die". With regard to the terminology of the Old Testament, it is not new, it is even included in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (363):
"In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person (Cf. Mt 16:25-26; Jn 15:13; Acts 2:41) But "soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him (Cf. Mt 10:28; 26:38; Jn 12:27; 2 Macc 6 30.), that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man.""
The term
"onoma" (=name) plays a similar role in the New Testament, e.g. Acts 1:15: "the number of names" = "the number of people".
Anyway, although JWs often accuse us of taking our concept of the soul from Plato, in fact, the Platonist understanding of the soul was condemned as heresy by the Catholic Church in 1312 at the Council of Vienne, where extreme monist and extreme dualist conceptions of man were condemned.
The historical fact is that in the time of Jesus, with the exception of the Sadducees, the Jews believed in the afterlife, and Jesus did not reprimand them for this, and in an interesting way he told a parable in which the rich man suffers in a fiery place. If a JW used such illustrations in his preaching work today, I would certainly not praise him for it. Because maybe he meant it symbolically and not literally. However, it is impossible that these symbols will only be "deciphered" by JWs after 1900 years and for 1900 years everyone will be forced to explain this as if this parable has a realistic basis.
There is a good article about the many uses of the word "soul" in the Bible: https://www.oodegr.com/english/dogma/diafora/enoies2.htm
"And is that not what the memorial is all about, the sacrifice of Jesus' body and blood?" - "Memorial" is a JW jargon, in Christianity it is called the Eucharist, and it is not only an annual event, and the majority of believers are not inherently excluded from it.
"And the fact that nobody recognized the resurrected Jesus, is also an indication that he rose with a different body." - It's enough for me to quote again:
He was not recognized for several reasons, all of which are indicated by the contexts.
-John 20. It was early in the morning and still dark, (vs. 1), and Mary was not expecting to see Jesus alive. Nowhere does the text say Jesus appeared to Mary as a gardener. It was Mary's mistake, not Jesus' appearance.
-John 21:4-12. Jesus was on the seashore, while the disciples were at sea in a ship. It was early morning. The disciples were 200 cubits (approx. 100 yards) from the land. Fog would have been raising from the water at that early hour obscuring the disciple's view.
Jesus' subsequent actions were those of someone possessing a body.
-Luke 24:16. The eyes of these disciples were "holden," or "veiled."
Jesus did this so they could not recognize Him because though He was the Living Word and had taught them for over three years He now wanted to direct their attention to the written Word.
When they saw from the scriptures that Jesus must suffer and be raised again He then unveiled their eyes so they could recognize Him.
The implication is very plain if Jesus had not "veiled" their eyes they would have recognized Him. If He was in "another form" there would have been no need to veil their eyes at all.
1 Corinthians 15:38 proves that the resurrected body is the same own body, 1 Corinthians 15:50-54 speaks of the "change" of this original body.
"In my mind the word “sacrifice” means the death of the victim." - That's what I said too, that's why Jesus' sacrifice already fully
"finished" on the cross when he died, not when God allegedly vaporized his body in the grave, especially since the Holy Scriptures does not say a word about this or the allegd necessity of it.
""See references to "Sons of God" .." - At most, your references prove that "sons of God" can mean angels, but they do not prove that it also actually means angels in Genesis 6:2." - It does not disprove it either." - The burden of proof is on you, since if you look at the commentaries, Christian and Jewish exegetes almost unanimously interpreted it as I wrote. By the way, logic also supports this, since angels are pure spirits who are able to appear visibly (with God's permission), but this is only apparent, they cannot concieve children.
"So where do the violent Nephilim ("giants"), "the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown" fit in then? (Gen. 6:4 ESV)" - The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the "sons of God" (men from the tribe of Seth) went in to the "daughters of men" (women from the tribe of Cain), and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, known from ancient times The Hebrew word "Nephil" does not necessarily mean a giant—though according to Numbers 13:33, the Nephilim could have been tall in stature—but rather generally refers to a violent, wild, unruly person. The Scipture here is talking about those heroes (heroi), whose deeds were later so colored and glorified by the (pagan) myth, - and precisely against their respect, it wants to emphasize that their wickedness hastened the coming of the flood.
