Pneuma #33

Pneuma comes from the verb “to blow” and originally meant moving air. In the New Testament it keeps the physical senses of wind and breath but is used far more often for spirit, and it is the ordinary word for the Holy Spirit. It is the Greek counterpart of the Hebrew ruach, and the Septuagint uses it to translate that word.

Biblical Usage

Jesus draws on the double meaning in John 3:8, where he compares the wind that blows where it wants to everyone who is born of the Spirit, in a passage where the same Greek word covers both. Elsewhere the word covers a person’s own inner life, as when the Spirit “beareth witness with our spirit” (Romans 8:16), and a disposition or attitude, as in the “spirit of meekness” Paul urges for restoring someone who has fallen (Galatians 6:1). It also names beings without bodies: angels are “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1:14), unclean spirits are cast out in the Gospels, and after the resurrection Jesus tells his disciples that a spirit does not have flesh and bones (Luke 24:39).

For the Holy Spirit the word describes the Spirit’s role in God’s work: descending at Jesus’s baptism, filling the church at Pentecost, and giving life. John 4:24 states that God is spirit, and Second Timothy 3:16 uses a related compound, theopneustos, for scripture that is “given by inspiration of God,” which literally means “God-breathed.”

Theological Significance

Because one Greek word covers so many senses, translators must decide from context whether a given occurrence means the Holy Spirit, a human spirit, or something more general, and some passages are genuinely disputed, especially in Paul. Paul also sets pneuma against sarx, as two ways of living, in Romans 8 and Galatians 5. Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and especially how the Spirit relates to the Father and the Son, is built largely on New Testament uses of this word, and the later Trinitarian debates turned on them.