Cornelius a Lapide

As it is written. 1. These words are, of course, to be referred to the first part only of the following verse, not to the latter : “ The last Adam was made a quickening spirit” This last is nowhere else found in Scripture. S. Paul is merely proving from Scripture that the body is here sown a natural body, from the fact that Adam, the father of all men, was made a living soul, and consequently was an animal, and had an animal body both in death and in life. Hence by an hyperbaton common in S. Paul, we may read the passage : “ The first man Adam was made, as it is written, a living soul ” (Gen. ii. 7). 2. The words, “as it is written,” may be referred, as Theophylact refers them, to the whole of the following verse, and may be the explanation and proof of what has just gone before, viz., that if there is a natural body there is a spiritual body also ; for it is implied that it is requisite to the perfection of everything that all kinds of things suppose the existence of their opposites. Where Scripture, therefore, expressly speaks of a first Adam being made a living soul, it implies that the second Adam will be a quickening spirit. The first man Adam was made a living soul. Adam was made a soul, an animal, living a vegetative and sensitive life, and therefore nourished by food and drink, and needing to be preserved in this his animal life. S. Paul uses a synecdoche. The last Adam was made a quickening spirit. In order that after His resurrection He might have a glorious soul to give life to His body and to make it spiritual, i.e ., glorious like a spirit, independent of food, impassible, and deathless. His body here, indeed, is ours as well as His own. S. Paul here again uses a synecdoche, and his 394 first epistle to the cor'inthians, c. xv. meaning is that Christ received a spirit or soul, able to quicken Himself and His members. Theophylact, Chrysostom, and Theodoret remark that S. Paul does not say a “living spirit,” but a*- “life-giving spirit;” for the soul or spirit of Christ does not merely enjoy life itself, but also gives life to others, and the life which He gives glorifies both our souls and bodies