Yet another possible indication of a holistic sense of sōma appears in a pair of parallel statements rather widely separated: ‘Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?’ (I Cor 6: 15a); ‘Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it’ (I Cor 12: 27). In the one, ‘bodies’ are members of Christ; in the other, ‘you’ are members. ‘Bodies’ and ‘you’ alternate with the result that ‘bodies’ takes on the meaning ‘your whole persons’. Or so we might think.

The personal pronoun ‘you’ is not limited to man's physical aspect in the statement ‘Now you are the body of Christ’. The whole person belongs to Christ's Body. (The exact force of ‘the Body of Christ’ does not affect the point made here.) But we need to ask, does the general statement of Paul concerning the whole person's membership in Christ's Body preclude his making a more specific statement elsewhere that a part of man's constitution belongs to Christ? It it possible that in a context quite different from that of the discussion concerning spiritual gifts, Paul may have limited his field of vision to the membership of the believer's physical body in Christ without ruling out the membership of the entire person of the believer? The answer lies in a close and lengthy look at the much-analyzed passage, I Cor 6: 12–20: