17 The Pauline Key Words πνεῦμα and σάρξ and their Translation processing the information explicitly or implicitly attached to the words by their contexts. Obviously this method does not produce a satisfactory description of the meaning of πνεῦμα and σάρξ. It only gives us a skel- eton, yet with a few muscles and tendons, a structure for a lexical descrip- tion of their meanings. The missing flesh of the body is the encyclopedical knowledge about πνεῦμα and σάρξ provided by secondary sources. These consist mainly of other Ancient Greek texts that have come down to us, the Hebrew Old Testament and, somewhat anachronistically, the com- mentaries on and translations of Paul’s letters. These sources, however, have no share in the methodological part of our investigation, as we are concentrating on building the skeleton. As a point of departure we have adopted a cognitive approach to semantics6. According to this theory, the meaning of a word consists of a range of associated ideas, of which some are more obvious or central (the profile) than others (the base)7. A good way to illustrate this is the window-on-network metaphor8. A word can be pictured as giving access to a room with a window from which one sees a huge network of ideas. Part of the network will be lit by the light shed through the window. Some ideas will be lit more clearly (the profile) than others (the base), but there is no clear dividing line to distinguish between the two. Both profile and base make up the meaning. In this respect, the influence of context on word meaning can be described as the light shed on the network through neighbouring windows, whereby the profile-base organization of the view through the original window is altered because less central ideas are lit more clearly now. Assuming that words can be polysemous, which will be necessary for the description of the meaning of the terms πνεῦμα and σάρξ, is assuming that a room has more than one window on the net- work. Ultimately, the light of the context will determine which window provides the clearest view. For a brief description of the methods and their theoretical foundations, see R. Dirven 6 – M. Verspoor, Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics (Amsterdam 1998), and D. Tuggy, “The Literal-Idiomatic Bible Translation Debate from the Perspective of Cognitive Grammar”, in K. Feyaerts (ed.), The Bible through Metaphor and Translation: A Cognitive Semantic Perspective (Religions and Discourse 15; Bern 2003) 239-288. For more extensive discussions we refer to J.R. Taylor, Cognitive Grammar (Oxford 2002); J.R. Taylor, Linguistic Categorization (Oxford 2003³); H. Cuyckens – R. Dirven – J.R. Taylor (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Lexical Semantics (Berlin 2003); W. Croft – D.A. Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge 2004); D. Geeraerts, Words and Other Wonders: Papers on Lexical and Semantic Topics (Berlin 2006); V. Edwards – M.C. Green, Cognitive Linguistics (Ed- inburgh 2006); . Ungerer – H.J. Schmid, An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics (London 2006); )V. Edwards – B.K. Bergen – J. Zinken (eds.), The Cognitive Linguistics Reader (London 2007); R.W. Langacker, Cognitive Grammar (Oxford 2008).