What gender is the Holy Spirit?
(Artist Depiction of Pentecost via Pixabay)
The second chapter of the Book of Acts starts off with:
1 When the Day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. 2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven, as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. 3 Then there appeared to them divided tongues, as of fire, and one sat upon each of them. 4 And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. (Acts 2:1-4)
Most groups that profess Christ consider that Pentecost marked the formal beginning of the New Testament church. And we read that God’s Holy Spirit was given and was associated with something that looked like fire.
Many languages, including koine Greek–the language that the New Testament was written in–use what is know as grammatical gender.
The koine Greek term for fire is πῦρ (pur), and it is grammatically neuter.
While most translations of the New Testament into the English language use the pronoun “he” related to the Holy Spirit as well as the “relative pronoun” “who,” neither of those pronouns are supported by the Greek text.
The Greek word for ‘spirit’ is pneuma. It is a neuter gender. It is not masculine nor should it be considered so.
And what about the Old Testament word for spirit, is that masculine?
No.
In the Hebrew scriptures, the terms for “Spirit” used, ruwach or ruah, for example in Genesis 1:2, are feminine (I once confirmed that with a Hebrew scholar personally).
Yet, despite that grammatical fact, some point to that term as proof of a male Holy Spirit. Notice something from Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible:
Gen 1:1-2
The plurality of persons in the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. This plural name of God, in Hebrew, which speaks of him… The Spirit of God was the first mover: He moved upon the face of the waters. (from Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible: New Modern Edition, Electronic Database. Copyright (c) 1991 by Hendrickson Publishers, Inc.)
Thus, seeing the term “he” in biased English commentaries on the Old Testament in no way supports the concept that the Holy Spirit is a male person.
Calling “she” “He” does not change the grammatical facts.
Though in the New Testament, many translators often improperly use the pronoun “he” associated with the term spirit, the KJV also sometimes correctly translates this as ‘it’:
16 The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: (Romans 8:16, KJV)
26 Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. (Romans 8:26, KJV)
“It” is the appropriate pronoun. The Holy Spirit is the power of God. And that was the belief of early Christians. It took the Council of Constantinople, under imperial order from Emperor Theodosius, to make certain unscriptural declarations related to the Holy Spirit that many accept today (see also Did Early Christians Think the Holy Spirit Was A Separate Person in a Trinity?).
Sean Finnegan in his paper titled The Holy Spirit and Translation Bias: A Smoking Gun of Trinity Mischief:
Although most of these Bibles stay relatively true to the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek in most places, nearly all of them still have significant blind spots that subtly lean readers towards a Trinitarian theology. In what follows I intend to expose one of the smoking guns of text tampering as it relates to the holy spirit. …
After seeing … that seventeen out of the nineteen {translations} use “who” or “whom” to refer back to holy spirit, what would someone conclude?
The most frustrating aspect of this chicanery is that these translations mislead honest-hearted men and women who simply want to read and understand the Scriptures. What is more, most Bible readers implicitly trust the scholars who produce translations in the same way that most people trust doctors or school teachers. This is partly due to the impressive verbiage we saw above in their translation philosophies. The NASB team “adhered to the literal philosophy of translation” and required “a word- for-word translation that is accurate and precise,” yet, they literally did not translate the word “ὅ” as “which.” The NET boasts that its nearly 61,000 translators’ notes enable readers to “look over the translator’s shoulder” and make “transparent the textual basis and the rationale for key renderings (including major interpretive options and alternative translations).” However, when I look at the footnotes on Acts 5.32, I see nothing whatsoever indicating they flat out changed a word to make their translation more palatable. Ironically, Daniel Wallace was one of the primary scholars involved in the NET and his paper on this subject exposes this very issue. The NIV committee stated that they were committed “to the authority and infallibility of the Bible as God’s Word in written form,” yet they corrected the infallible Scripture in their translation to read “whom” instead of “which.” Isn’t a correction the result of an error? But, if Scripture is infallible, why is the NIV correcting it? Lastly, the NRSV claims it is “the most accurate and readable translation” and that it “leaves interpretation in the hands of the reader.” Yet, in this verse (and many others like it), it obscures the meaning of the text and does not so much as leave a footnote indicating their decision. So if the Greek is clear, why do nearly all of these translations get it wrong?
Why do all of these translations think the simple word ὅ (which) is really ὅν (whom)?
Perhaps I should probably mention that someone told me that Dr. Daniel Wallace did try to get the neuter gender used for the Holy Spirit when he was involved in a Bible translation project, but that he was overridden. This is even more appalling when it is realized that Dr. Wallace was the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible.
Dr. Wallace, himself, wrote:
About half a dozen texts in the NT are used in support of the Spirit’s personality on the grounds of gender shift due to constructio ad sensum (“construction according to sense” or, in this case, according to natural as opposed to grammatical gender). That is to say, these passages seem to refer to the Spirit with the masculine gender in spite of the fact that πνεύμα is neuter, and grammatical concord would normally require that any reference to the Spirit also be in the neuter gender. …
Many theologians treat these passages as a primary proof of the Spirit’s personality. …
John 16:7 can be dismissed … Whatever the reason for the masculine participle in v. 7, it is evident that the grammaticization of the Spirit’s personality is not the only, nor even the most plausible, explanation. Since this text also involves serious exegetical problems (i.e., a variety of reasons as to why the masculine participle is used), it cannot be marshaled as unambiguous syntactical proof of the Spirit’s personality. In sum, none of the gender shift passages clearly helps establish the personality of the Holy Spirit.
Before going further in Dr. Wallace’s work, let us see two translations of John 16:7 that do NOT make the gender error, using the term “him,” that most other translations into English commit:
7 But I tell you I am going to do what is best for you. This is why I am going away. The Holy Spirit cannot come to help you until I leave. But after I am gone, I will send the Spirit to you.
(Contemporary English Version)7 But I am telling you the truth. It is profitable for you that I go away because if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you. However, if I go, I will send it to you. (A Faithful Version)
Now, back to Dr. Wallace, he wrote:
There is no text in the NT that clearly or even probably affirms the personality of the Holy Spirit through the route of Greek grammar. …
Evangelical defenses of various doctrines occasionally are poorly founded. We sometimes claim things to be true because we want them to be true, without doing the exhaustive spadework needed to support our conclusions. …
In sum, I have sought to demonstrate in this paper that the grammatical basis for the Holy Spirit’s personality is lacking in the NT, yet this is frequently, if not usually, the first line of defense of that doctrine by many evangelical writers. But if grammar cannot legitimately be used to support the Spirit’s personality, then perhaps we need to reexamine the rest of our basis for this theological commitment. (Wallace D. Greek Grammar and the Personality of the Holy Spirit. Bulletin for Biblical Research 13.1 (2003) 97-125)
John 15:26 … The use of ἐκεἲνος {that one} here is frequently regarded by students of the NT to be an affirmation of the personality of the Holy Spirit. … 42 …
But this is erroneous. In all these Johannine passages, πνεύμα {spirit} is appositional to a masculine noun. The gender of ἐκεἲνος has nothing to do with the natural gender ending of πνεύμα. …
The view is especially popular among theologians, not infrequently becoming their mainstay for their argument for the personality of the Holy Spirit … (Wallace D. Greek Grammar. Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 331-332).
Yes, many rely of false information to promote the trinitarian personhood of the Holy Spirit.
An Eastern Orthodox priest and scholar, Dr. Laurent Cleenewerck, wrote:
Greek manuscripts do not have any capitalization. Hence, the introduction of capitalized forms is arbitrary … (as in ‘a holy spirit’ without capitalization) (Cleenewerck L. EOB: The Eastern/Greek Orthodox New Testament, p. 33).
So, capitalization does not make the Holy Spirit a person. Dr. Laurent Cleenewerck also wrote:
The first thing to notice is that both pneuma and ruah also convey the meaning “breath” or “wind,” which explains the subtle nuances of such passages as Genesis 1:2; John 3:8 or James 2:26. On this basis we could say that pneuma and ruah are used as a reference to an unseen causal agent whose effects are visible.
The Greek… pneuma is neuter, which is why it is never spoken of with personal pronouns … an unbiased translation requires the use of of the conjunction “that/which” instead of “who/whom.” (Cleenewerck, p. 34).
Yet, although Dr. Cleenewerck was the editor of EOB: The Eastern/Greek Orthodox New Testament that particular translation uses “who” in Matthew 10:20 and John 6:63 (to cite two examples), “whom” in John 15:26, and masculine personal pronouns “he” and “him” in John 14:17, related to pneuma as the Holy Spirit. Yes, that translation has intentionally violated the appropriate grammatical rules according to its editor!
The fact is that there should NOT be personal pronouns—especially male ones—in English language translations of scripture associated with the Holy Spirit.
Ambassador College once published the following:
Somebody is going to ask: “What about the fact that John uses the personal pronoun ‘he’ when referring to the Holy Spirit or Comforter in the 14th, 15th and 16th chapters of his Gospel?” … in the Greek language, the gender of a word has nothing whatever to do with whether the thing designated is really masculine or feminine in the human sense at all. lf it did — what a contradiction in the Bible itself! For in the Old Testament the Hebrew word for spirit — ruach — is usually feminine, and only rarely in a masculine form. Gender in language is really nothing more than a convenient grammatical tool. In the 14th, 15th and 16th chapters of John, the English pronoun “he” is definitely used in connection with the word “Comforter” — but not for theological or spiritual reasons.
Grammatically, all pronouns in Greek must agree in gender with the word they refer to — or in other words, with the term that the pronoun replaces. The Greek word parakletos (“comforter” in English) has masculine gender; hence the translators’ use of the personal pronoun “he” for the Greek pronouns ekeinos and autos. “It” would have been a far better rendering into the English language (Just What Is The Holy Spirit? Ambassador College Production, 1983)
Fred Coulter wrote:
John 15:26, KJV: “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me.”
The word “which,” referring to “the Spirit of truth,” is correctly translated from the neuter pronoun ο. In John 14:17, the translators of the KJV had incorrectly rendered this neuter pronoun as “whom.” However, in John 15:26, they have correctly rendered the neuter relative pronoun ο as “which.”
The descriptive noun “the Comforter” is correctly translated from the masculine Greek noun ο παρακλητος ho parakleetos. While this masculine noun is used to describe a vital function of the Holy Spirit, it does not designate the Holy Spirit, or “the Spirit of the truth,” as a person. A descriptive noun never changes the gender of the principal noun. (Coulter F. A Faithful Version, 2nd edition, Appendix K: Exegesis for the Translation of the Phrase “the Holy Spirit” as Antecedent in John 14, 15 and 16. York Publishing Company, 2011, pp. 1282-1285)
While “comforter” is masculine grammatically, that is not proof that the Holy Spirit is male or a person.
The grammatical reality is that the Greek noun pneuma (πνεύμα), in all its various forms, is always and only neuter in gender. Likewise, all pronouns that refer to pneuma are always and only can be neuter in gender. If the Holy Spirit were a masculine person, the nouns and pronouns in the Greek text would have to have been written in the masculine gender, as are all the nouns and pronouns that refer to God the Father and Jesus Christ. Yet, as Dr. Wallace and others have concluded, nowhere in the Greek text of the New Testament is the Holy Spirit ever designated by a noun or pronoun in the masculine gender.
False tradition triumphed truth–this is not new. Jesus complained about that in His day as well:
7 Hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy about you, saying:
8 “These people draw near to Me with their mouth,
And honor Me with their lips,
But their heart is far from Me.
9 And in vain they worship Me,
Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.” (Matthew 15:7-9)
Real Christians do not hypocritically worship God in vain.
While Protestantism has tended to claim it believes in sola Scriptura, the Bible alone for doctrine as opposed to accepting the councils of men that the Roman and Orthodox Catholic churches do, most Protestants have accepted traditions of men over the Bible related to the Holy Spirit.
Anyway, that said, the grammatical gender of the Hebrew word for spirit is feminine and the grammatical gender of the Greek word for spirit is neutral.
The grammatically proper conclusion after reviewing the Hebrew and Greek scriptures is that the Holy Spirit is NOT a “he.” And if one wants to assign a gender to it, “it,” meaning the neuter gender would make the most sense for Christians.
Do not fall for false traditions that say that the Holy Spirit is masculine, because scripturally that is grammatically false.
Some items of possibly related interest may include:
Did Early Christians Think the Holy Spirit Was A Separate Person in a Trinity? Or did they have a different view? Here is a link to a related sermon: Truth about the Holy Spirit: What THEY do not want you to know!
Did the True Church Ever Teach a Trinity? Most act like this is so, but is it? Here is an old, by somewhat related, article in the Spanish language LA DOCTRINA DE LA TRINIDAD. A related sermon is available: Trinity: Fundamental to Christianity or Something Else? A brief video is also available: Three trinitarian scriptures?
Was Unitarianism the Teaching of the Bible or Early Church? Many, including Jehovah’s Witnesses, claim it was, but was it?
Binitarianism: One God, Two Beings Before the Beginning This is a longer article than the Binitarian View article, and has a little more information on binitarianism, and less about unitarianism. A related sermon is also available: Binitarian view of the Godhead.
Hope of Salvation: How the Continuing Church of God Differs from Protestantism The CCOG is NOT Protestant. This free online book explains how the real Church of God differs from mainstream/traditional Protestants. Several sermons related to the free book are also available: Protestant, Baptist, and CCOG History; The First Protestant, God’s Command, Grace, & Character; The New Testament, Martin Luther, and the Canon; Eucharist, Passover, and Easter; Views of Jews, Lost Tribes, Warfare, & Baptism; Scripture vs. Tradition, Sabbath vs. Sunday; Church Services, Sunday, Heaven, and God’s Plan; Seventh Day Baptists/Adventists/Messianics: Protestant or COG?; Millennial Kingdom of God and God’s Plan of Salvation; Crosses, Trees, Tithes, and Unclean Meats; The Godhead and the Trinity; Fleeing or Rapture?; and Ecumenism, Rome, and CCOG Differences.
Beliefs of the Original Catholic Church: Could a remnant group have continuing apostolic succession? Did the original “catholic church” have doctrines held by the Continuing Church of God? Did Church of God leaders uses the term “catholic church” to ever describe the church they were part of? Here are links to related sermons: Original Catholic Church of God?, Original Catholic Doctrine: Creed, Liturgy, Baptism, Passover, What Type of Catholic was Polycarp of Smyrna?, Tradition, Holy Days, Salvation, Dress, & Celibacy, Early Heresies and Heretics, Doctrines: 3 Days, Abortion, Ecumenism, Meats, Tithes, Crosses, Destiny, and more, Saturday or Sunday?, The Godhead, Apostolic Laying on of Hands Succession, Church in the Wilderness Apostolic Succession List, Holy Mother Church and Heresies, and Lying Wonders and Original Beliefs. Here is a link to that book in the Spanish language: Creencias de la iglesia Católica original.
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