Our question now becomes this: Did Paul forsake the anthropological duality of the other early Christian writers, current Judaistic beliefs, the OT, and Hellenistic thought by going his own way into a monadic view of the human constitution? A negative answer lies in a string of dichotomous passages running through his epistles.

‘Though our outer man is wasting away, yet our inner man is being renewed every day’ (II Cor 4: 16). The contrast between inner man and outer man was native to Hellenistic thought. But unlike Hellenistic thinkers, Paul does not denigrate the outer man as evil or irrational. And the eschatological frame of reference (see the following vv.) contrasts with Hellenistic thinking. Despite these differences, however, Paul makes the same basic distinction between the physical and the non-physical. We might deny this by attaching other meanings to the inner man and the outer man and by making both refer to the indivisible personality seen from within and seen from without. Indivisibility is hard to accept, however, because the outer man even now is passing away while the inner man gains in vigor. Ultimately the inner exists without the outer, or rather, receives a new outer man (5: 1–5).

The attempt to redefine the inner man and the outer man usually runs in the direction of treating the inner man as the ‘new man’ in Christ (Eph 4: 24; Col 3: 10; cf. the corporate new man in Eph 2: 15).