The Greek New Testament does not call the Holy Spirit an it!

Grammatical gender is rather ordinary in most languages but completely absent from English.  In English, men are he/him, women are she/her, and everything else is an it.  Because English follows a sort of “natural gender,” English speakers often believe gender in other languages also denotes the sex or personhood of what is being discussed.  If a noun in another language is masculine, for example, English speakers assume it denotes a human male.  

Grammatical gender is merely a type of grammatical designation.  In Spanish, for example, the word for a lady’s dress is el vestido, which is masculine, while the word for a man’s necktie is la corbata, which is feminine.  This seems totally absurd to English speakers because a lady’s dress should obviously be feminine and the necktie, masculine!  

In my opinion, it’s unfortunate we even use the word gender to describe it.  It might help native-English speakers if we imagine the word class when talking about gender.  For example, instead of saying masculine nouns, we could say class-M nouns.  Since this blog is written in English, I’m assuming the people who read it also speak English so grouping nouns into classes instead of gender might help you as you think about this post.  

Spanish only has two genders: masculine and feminine.  There is no neuter gender in Spanish.  However, Greek has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter.  Since the New Testament was written in Greek and since English uses he, she, and it, the tendency to project our English understanding of gender onto the text becomes almost irresistible.  Therefore, problems sometimes arise when people try to use the gender of a Greek word to make a doctrinal point.  

A blog that calls itself Examining the Trinity has pointed out that the Holy Spirit in the original Greek is neuter.  They went on to say this:

But "Holy Spirit" in the original Greek is neuter and therefore the neuter pronouns "it," "itself" are used with it in the original NT Greek! Any strictly literal Bible translation would have to use "it" for the holy spirit (since it is really not a person, but God's active force, a literal translation would be helpful in this case).

This is an extremely amateurish argument. It demonstrates how a little knowledge can be dangerous. Most people who use this argument really can't read Greek. Instead, they have heard once that the Greek word for “Spirit” is neuter so, because of their understanding of English, they buy into the argument that the Spirit is an “it.” Of course, there are some people who indeed understand Greek's grammatical use of gender but still repeat the argument with the intention of preying on the audience's ignorance of the subject.

First, this is a blatant example of special pleading because the same people who raise this argument don't apply this same standard everywhere. In Matthew 2:11, for example,  the Bible says the wise men, “saw the young child with Mary his mother.” The Greek word for child here (paidion, παιδίον, Strong’s word 3813) is neuter so, to be consistent, they should translate this verse as “they saw the young child with Mary its mother.” Of course they don't do that. Neither do they refer to the church as her or the book as him or “correctly” render the hundred other instances where Greek gender does not agree with English ideas of gender.

There's another subtle flaw in the above quote that might escape notice. The author seems unaware of the flaw and cites a source that commits the same mistake. See if you can spot it in this quote:

The Greek word for 'spirit' is neuter, and while we use personal pronouns in English ('he,' 'his,' 'him'), most Greek manuscripts employ 'it.' [bold in original]

Did you catch it? If not, don't feel bad because it's sort of a technicality and some might accuse me of splitting hairs. However, I feel it's an important consideration. This quote says, “most Greek manuscripts employ 'it.'” The reality is that NO Greek manuscript contains the word, it! The word it is an English word which conveys a certain meaning in English. It is more precise to say that the Greek manuscripts use the neuter pronoun (auton) whenever the antecedent is a neuter noun. The original authors were not thinking “it” whenever they wrote "auton." Again, think, “class” instead of gender and it might help.  Class-N nouns use class-N pronouns.  

A language is more than its vocabulary; each language also has its own grammar as well as its own idioms. The goal of any translation is to express the same meaning in the target language that is conveyed in the original language. A good translation should obey the rules of the target language – not slavishly render a hyper-literal, word for word exchange of the original language. The pronouns used in our translations should follow the rules of English, not Greek! If the antecedent is an object, the English pronoun should be it. If the antecedent is a person, the English pronoun should be he or she.

If anyone wants to deny the Personhood of the Holy Spirit, he must make his case using Scripture. A weak appeal to the gender of a Greek word – especially an appeal made by someone who can't even read Greek – isn't even close.

These aren’t just expressions

Have you ever heard the adage, “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead” or “By failing to prepare you are preparing to fail”?  Witticisms like these are invented to encourage best practices or to describe some obvious truth.  These particular quotes are attributed to Ben Franklin but many other American characters have quipped equally memorable expressions.  Statements like these are ingrained in our culture - they are our lore, if you will.

Some idioms we use are very short: barking up the wrong tree, shooting fish in a barrel, taking candy from a baby, pleading the fifth, and etc. I don’t know how many of these I could cite - certainly dozens, maybe hundreds.  In every case, when we hear phrases like this, we usually know what the speaker means to say.  

Often, though, we don’t have any idea how a phrase came into use in the first place.  For example, why does “put up with” mean “to tolerate”?  If a non-English speaking person tries to translate the words put, up, and with, individually, he will still not be able to understand what the English phrase means.  It’s just one of those things we say without knowing why we say it.

I came to this realization many years ago, while I was still a teenager.  When I was coming out of Ahrens Vocational School in downtown Louisville, KY, there were some Gideons (I didn’t know they were Gideons at the time because I’d never heard of them) on the sidewalk handing out New Testaments to students.  I took one.  

Even though it was only a NT, this was the first Bible I’d ever owned.  My family did have a big Bible but it was more like a table decoration.  You know the kind: 5 inches thick, gilded pages, and embossed with “Holy Bible” on the front in Old English font.  I remember flipping through that tome but I never actually read it.  But now that I had a Bible of my own - one which was pocket sized and more convenient to carry with me - I decided for the first time to start reading it.

The NT starts with Matthew, of course, and as I read it, a strange familiarity began to creep over me.  I kind of knew about Jesus -the Savior, He died on a cross, rose from the dead, and all that so that wasn’t new.  What struck me the most, though, were the familiar sayings that I’d heard and even used all my life!

I thought it would be interesting to take a minute and consider just a handful of expressions, used in our everyday lives, that are taken straight from the Bible.  For the sake of this post, I’m limiting this to examples found in the Gospel of Matthew.  Are we ready?  Let’s begin:

“Man can’t live on bread alone,” Matthew 4:4

“He’s the salt of the earth,” Matthew 5:13

“He’d give you the shirt off his back,” Matthew 5:40

“He always goes the extra mile,” Matthew 5:41

As weird as it might sound, I had heard all of these expressions before; I just had no idea they were based on Bible verses.  Seriously.  Looking back now, I laugh at how ignorant I was of Scripture.  To me, “going the extra mile” was just another adage similar to, “early to bed and early to rise….”  I guess I just assumed someone like Ben Franklin or Mark Twain made it up.  

There are many more examples, still.  Ronald Reagan called the US a shining “city on a hill”; he took this from Matthew 5:14. Some people believe Abraham Lincoln coined the phrase, “A nation divided against itself cannot stand” but he was actually quoting Jesus in Matthew 12:25.

I’ve seen Bible verses being used (knowingly or unknowingly) in the workplace.  When a manager doesn’t seem to know what he’s doing, we might say it’s a case of, “the blind leading the blind” (Matthew 15:14). In a large corporation, sometimes conflicting directives are given to employees and they say, “the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing” (Matthew 6:3).

If we become especially angry with someone, we might say, “I’ll have his head on a platter” (Matthew 14:10-11).  If a child says something funny or clever, we might quip, “Out of the mouth of babes….” (Matthew 21:16).  When a loved one isn’t living up to his potential, we might tell him, “You’re hiding your light under a bushel” (Matthew 5:15).  When someone quits after a long struggle, it might be said, “he gave up the ghost” (Matthew 27:50).

If you’ve been a Christian for a while, you’re probably familiar with all of these verses.  However, I’m telling you that, when I was an unbeliever, I was completely oblivious to the source of these common turns of phrase.  It was only as I began to read them for myself, that I began to understand how much Christianity had already shaped my understanding of the world.

It wasn’t until a few years later that I became a Christian.  Once I became born again, I believe God instilled in me a hunger for His word.  It’s like I can never read it, think about it, or talk about it enough.  Yet in spite of how much I’ve learned from the Bible, I’m embarrassed by how little I think I know it.  Those first few nuggets that caught my eye as an unbeliever, weren’t just expressions.  They were a testimony to how rich the Bible is in wisdom and how enduring its advice can be.