Actually, the biblical understanding is that we are a body with a soul, completely unified. This is why Jews, and then Christians historically, have always honored their dead with burial, not cremation, because of the expectation of resurrection.
This is also why the Christian creeds (Apostles, Nicene, etc.) include the term "resurrection of the dead" instead of the term "immortality of the soul," which is actually a Greek/pagan idea.
Point being, we are not ultimately disembodied souls...weighed down with a body (that's a pagan/gnostic idea)rather full human life is and will be forever...in a body.
I'm not saying souls do NOT separate from the body at death--as it surely appears they do (and the Church has taught so for a long time), I'm only saying that full human existence is physical--body AND soul--and, the bible is unequivocal about a physical resurrection at the 2nd coming of Jesus.
Souls separated from the body after death now are known as an "intermediate state," as eternal life--according to all orthodox Christian teaching--will be in a new resurrection body (as Jesus' life is in a (new) body up to this day...).
I am one of the 4 billion people of the world who believes in reincarnation. That I am a soul with a body.
Jesus was an Essene, a Jewish sect that did believe in reincarnation. So did the Pharisees. The Sadduccees did not know what happened to the soul upon death.
In the fourth century A.D. Emperor Constantine appointed Pope Damascus and formed the Council of Nicea in which all teachings of reincarnation were dropped from the New Testament. Pope Vigillus protested and refused to participate.
The Catholic Church’s problem with reincarnation was that this belief takes away their control of the salvation of the masses and puts it in each individual’s hands. Remember indulgences?
Origen and St. Augustine, the most eminent of the Church’s fathers, believed in reincarnation. Pistis Sophia, a Gnostic text, quotes Jesus as saying, “Souls are poured from one into another of different bodies of the world.”
Excellent historical synopsis of reincarnation in the Catholic Church can be found here -
http://www.fromthestars.com/page48.html
Reincarnation to me has always made logical theological sense. It explains all those times we wonder, ‘How could God have allowed this or that tragedy to happen?’