Spirit?

It's not uncommon to be reminded in books, articles, or sermons that the Hebrew ruach and the Greek pneuma share the semantic domains spirit, wind, and breath. It's funny to me that in English we have three different words to communicate something that only needed one in our "sacred" languages. (By that I mean the languages that bring us our sacred writings.)

I think the relative explosion of words in English to translate the single word from Hebrew or Greek hurts our understanding. The fact that translators try to parse whether the word means breath here and spirit there hurts our ability to see resonances that would have been obvious to the original readers.

Take for instance the idea that the Holy Spirit dwells in us. What if we looked back to Genesis and saw that God's creative act that made humans human was his breathing into our nostrils? How about translating Paul this way: "Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the holy breath, who is in you, whom you have received from God?" With that, you see that this Holy Spirit is what actually rehumanizes us. Naturally, there's the question of the pronouns that follow. I left them as "who," but in Greek they're neuter, as is pneuma. The translators moved from a pronoun that might more appropriately be translated "which" to "who" in order to personalize the holy pneuma. No doubt the Spirit is a person, but if you translate it as God's holy breath, it sounds awkward in English to say "who."

Think also of Jesus at the end of the gospel according to John. "With that he breathed on them and said, 'Receive the Holy Spirit.' " This is Jesus taking seriously his role in the creation process from the beginning of the gospel. Perhaps if he did this in America today, he would say, "Breathe the breath of God, which makes you truly human." He continues by saying that those he just breathed on are capable of dispensing forgiveness. The Pharisees questioned Jesus for doing that, but in a sense it is a capacity that resides in humans, especially because Jesus re-created those he breathed on.

Regardless, it's helpful to remember that wherever the Holy Spirit is referenced, it should remind us that humans were always intended to breathe God's breath. Perhaps it's the Holy Spirit that/who sets us apart from more apish living as in Francis Collin's fascinating anthropology expounded in his book, The Language of God.