Does the Holy Spirit have a personal gender in the scriptures? Both ancient Hebrew (language of the Old Testament) and koine Greek (language of the New Testament) use grammatical gender when it comes to nouns. In the Hebrew scriptures, the terms for “Spirit” are ruwach or ruah--are they masculine, feminine, or neuter? What about the Greek term pneuma for "Spirit" in the New Testament? According to Protestant scholar Dr. Daniel Wallace are personal pronouns ever grammatically appropriate for the Holy Spirit? According to Eastern Orthodox priest Dr. Laurent Cleenwerck is it grammatically appropriate to use "who" or "whom" associated with the Holy Spirit? Do most translations of the New Testament intentionally violate rules of Greek grammar related to the Holy Spirit? Should people intentionally change the word of God to show a meaning that God did not inspire? Was the King James Version correct when referring to the Holy Spirit as 'it"? Does referring to a "she" as a "he" make it so? Dr. Thiel and Steve Dupuie go over these matters quoting scriptures as well as scholars who have translated the New Testament into the English language.
A written article of related interest is available titled ' What gender is the Holy Spirit?' URL: https://www.cogwriter.com/news/doctrine/what-gender-is-the-holy-spirit/
A written article of related interest is available titled ' What gender is the Holy Spirit?' URL: https://www.cogwriter.com/news/doctrine/what-gender-is-the-holy-spirit/
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00:00Greetings, friends. This is Steve Dupuy for the Bible News Prophecy Program with Dr. Bob
00:09Thiel. Dr. Thiel, the topic I would like to discuss today is the Holy Spirit. Specifically,
00:16is it male or female? Well, actually, neither. But let's go to the Bible to find out what
00:21the Bible actually teaches. First, let's start off in the second chapter of the book of Acts.
00:25It talks about when the day of Pentecost fully came, disciples were all in one place. There
00:31came a sound from heaven, and it filled the whole house they were sitting. And there appeared
00:36to them divided tongues as of fire. And one sat on each of them, and they were filled
00:41with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
00:46Now this was the beginning, formal beginning, if you will, of the New Testament church.
00:50And we see that God's Holy Spirit was given, and it was associated with something that
00:55looked like fire. Now many languages, including Koine Greek, which is what the New Testament
01:02was written in, use what's called grammatical gender. And the Koine Greek term, by the way,
01:11for fire in English would be pronounced pur, and that is grammatically neuter. Could you
01:19please explain more fully what you mean by grammatically neuter? It means it's not masculine
01:25nor feminine. Now while most translations of the New Testament English language use
01:31the pronoun he related to the Holy Spirit, as well as the relative pronoun who, neither
01:38of those pronouns is actually supported by the Greek text. Now the Greek word for spirit
01:44is pneuma. It's a neutered gender. It's not masculine, nor should it be considered so.
01:51Well, what about the Old Testament word for spirit? Is that masculine?
01:58No. Actually, in the Hebrew Scriptures, the term for spirit used is one of two words,
02:04ruach or ruah, and they are feminine. Yet despite this grammatical fact,
02:11some will look at mistranslations or some will point to commentaries. For example,
02:16here's an error from Matthew Henry's commentary in the whole Bible related to Genesis chapter 1,
02:22the first two verses. It says, the plurality of persons in the Godhead, the plural name in Hebrew
02:29speaks of him. The Spirit of God was the first mover. He moved upon the face of the waters.
02:35Well, you see, he, in this biased commentary, but no way supports the concept that the Holy
02:44Spirit is a male person. Because the term for spirit is, would be she. So calling she,
02:52he doesn't change the grammatical facts. Well, if we don't use the word he when
02:57referring to the Holy Spirit, what word would we use that would be more grammatically correct?
03:03Now, through the New Testament, translators often used he associated with the term spirit.
03:11But occasionally, even the old King James got it correct and used the term it. For example,
03:17Romans 8 verse 16 says, the Spirit itself bears witness with our spirit that we're the children
03:23of God. Romans 8 26. Likewise, the Spirit also helps our infirmities. We don't know how we should
03:30pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot
03:34be uttered. And it is the appropriate pronoun. The Holy Spirit is the power of God. And this
03:41was the belief of early Christians. It took the council of Constantinople under the imperial
03:46order from Emperor Theodosius to make certain unscriptural declarations related to the Holy
03:52Spirit that many accept today. Would one of those unscriptural declarations be related to
03:59the understanding of the Trinity? Absolutely, Kirk, yes. I'd like to read something from Sean
04:06Finnegan. He had a paper titled The Holy Spirit and Translation Bias, A Smoking Gun of Trinity
04:13Mischief. So here's what he wrote. Although most Bibles stay relatively true to the original Hebrew,
04:20Aramaic, and Greek in most places, nearly all of them have significant blind spots that subtly
04:26lean towards Trinitarian theology. I want to expose one of these having to do with the Holy Spirit.
04:3517 out of 19 translations he checked used the term who or whom referring to the Holy Spirit
04:43when, by the way, the Greek doesn't go for that. He says this misleads honest-hearted men and
04:52women who simply want to understand what the scriptures say. Now, he says, for example,
04:58the NASB team claimed to, quote, adhere to the literal philosophy of translation. It required
05:05a word-for-word translation that's accurate and precise, yet they didn't properly translate the
05:11word O, which means which, and the NET boasts of having nearly 61,000 translator notes to look over
05:20the shoulders to make sure there's no bias, but he said that, no, they got it wrong as well.
05:26He says, ironically, Daniel Wallace, one of the primary scholars involved in the NET translation,
05:33exposes this very issue. Furthermore, he says the NIV committee stated they were committed to the
05:38authority and infallibility of God's word in a written form, yet according to infallible
05:45scriptures, their translation reads whom instead of which. Now, this is a mistranslation. If the
05:53scripture is infallible, why is the NIV correcting it? And why don't the other translations do it?
06:01Yet, in various verses, they don't do it correctly. Why do all these translations think the simple
06:08word O, which is which, is really Oon, which means whom? That's amazing. This is truly a cover-up of
06:18biblical proportions. Is there any rebuttal against the charge of altering holy scriptures
06:24by the translators? Yeah, actually, somebody told me that Dr. Daniel Wallace did try to get the
06:29neuter gender used for the Holy Spirit when he was involved in the NET translation project,
06:35but he was overridden. And this is even more appalling when you realize that Dr. Wallace
06:41was actually the senior New Testament editor of the NET Bible. Now, Dr. Wallace himself wrote,
06:48about a dozen texts in the New Testament are used to support the Spirit's personality on the grounds
06:53of gender shift. That is to say, these passages seem to refer to the Spirit in a masculine gender
07:01in spite of the fact that the word pneuma is neuter, and a grammatical concord would require
07:08any reference to be in a neuter gender. Yet, many theologians treat these passages as primary proof
07:15of the Spirit's personality. It says, John 16, 7 can be dismissed. Whatever the reason for the
07:23masculine participle in verse 7, it's evident that the grammatization of the Spirit's personality is
07:30not only nor even the most plausible explanation. Since this text involves serious exegesical
07:39problems, it cannot be marshaled out as unambiguous proof of the Spirit's personality.
07:48In sum, none of the gender shift passages clearly help establish the personality of the Holy Spirit.
07:54Now, before going further, I looked at two translations of John 16, 7, who don't make this
08:01error. So, this will be from the CEV. I tell you, I'm going to do what's best for you. That's why
08:08I'm going away. The Holy Spirit cannot come to you until I leave. But after I'm gone, I will send
08:13the Spirit to you. And the AFV also says basically the same thing. Now, back to Dr. Wallace. He also
08:23wrote, there is no text in the New Testament that clearly or even probably affirms the personality
08:29of the Holy Spirit through the route of Greek grammar. Evangelical defenses of various doctrines
08:36occasionally are poorly founded. We sometimes claim things to be true because we want them to
08:41be true without doing the exhaustive spadework needed to support the conclusions. In sum,
08:46I've sought to demonstrate in this paper that the grammatical basis for the Holy Spirit personality
08:52is lacking in the New Testament, yet is frequently, if not usually, the first line of
08:57defense of that doctrine from many evangelical writers. But if grammar cannot be legitimately
09:04used to support the Spirit's personality, then perhaps we need to re-examine the rest of our
09:09basis for this theological commitment. Now, this was published back in 2003 in the Bulletin of
09:18Biblical Research, and it used to be online. But I found out this week they yanked that,
09:22you can't even find that online anymore. Now, Wallace wrote another paper, and he says that
09:34although this idea, John 15, 26, is masculine, it's not. It's got nothing to do with the natural
09:43gender ending of the word pneuma, which is neuter. But he says the other view is especially
09:51popular among theologians, not infrequently becoming their mainstay for their argument
09:57of the personality of the Holy Spirit, end quote. Are there no theologians that understand the truth
10:04of the misinterpretations of the gender of the Holy Spirit? Oh yeah, there's many, but many also
10:10rely on false information to promote the Trinitarian personhood of the Holy Spirit.
10:15Now, that being said, there's an Eastern Orthodox priest and scholar that I know
10:19by the name of Dr. Loren Kleenerwerk, and he wrote, quote, Greek manuscripts do not have
10:26any capitalization. Hence, the introduction of capitalized forms is arbitrary. And so,
10:33people think, oh, the Holy Spirit is translated, that means it's divine. No, they just
10:38capitalized it. So, that doesn't make it a person. But he also wrote, the first thing to notice is
10:44both pneuma, which is from the New Testament, and rua from the Old Testament convey the meaning
10:49of breath or wind. That explains the subtle nuances in various biblical passages. On this
10:55basis, you can say pneuma and rua are used as a reference to an unseen causal agent whose effects
11:01are visible. The Greek pneuma is neuter, which is why it's never spoken of with personal pronouns.
11:08An unbiased translation requires the use of the conjunction that or which instead of who or whom.
11:15Yet, Dr. Kleenerwerk, who is the editor of the Eastern Orthodox Bible, his Bible translates
11:22who or whom instead of which, like it's supposed to. And they also use he and him,
11:27like you're not supposed to. And so, that's simply wrong. Now, some have also pointed to
11:35the use of the term comforter. Now, that is used in the Book of John, and it does have a masculine
11:43gender. But this particular noun is used to describe a vital function of the Holy Spirit.
11:52And the Holy Spirit is a neuter term. So, while comforter is masculine grammatically,
12:01it's not proof the Holy Spirit is a man or a person. Why not? The grammatical reality—this
12:10is the Greek pronoun pneuma—in all its various forms is always and only neuter in gender. Likewise,
12:17all the pronouns that refer to pneuma can only be neuter in gender. So, if the Holy Spirit
12:22were a masculine person, the nouns and pronouns in the Greek text would have had to be written
12:27in a masculine gender, but as those that refer to the Father and to Jesus' Son. Yet, Dr. Wallace
12:36and Dr. Kleenerwerk and others have concluded nowhere in the Greek text is Holy Spirit ever
12:42designated by a noun or pronoun in the masculine gender. Does the Bible give us a word of warning
12:48about those that knowingly twist the Holy Scripture? Yes. False tradition often is
12:56triumphing truth. You know, people should be able to read the Bible translations and trust it,
13:01but they can't. But this isn't new. Jesus complained that people went for tradition
13:06over the Word of God in his day. He said to people who thought they were God's people,
13:11in Matthew chapter 15 starting verse 7, hypocrites, well did Isaiah prophesy about you,
13:18saying, these people draw near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their
13:22heart is far from me, and in vain they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
13:30Look, real Christians do not hypocritically worship God in vain. While Protestantism has
13:36tended to claim that it believes in sola scriptura, the Bible alone for doctrine,
13:41as opposed to accepting counsels of men that Roman and Orthodox churches do,
13:48most Protestants have accepted traditions of men over the Bible related to the Holy Spirit.
13:55Anyway, the grammatical gender of the Hebrew word for spirit is feminine,
14:01and the grammatical gender for the Greek word for spirit is neutral. The grammatically proper
14:08conclusion after reviewing the Hebrew and Greek scriptures is that the Holy Spirit is not a he.
14:14If anyone wants to assign a gender to it, it, meaning the neuter gender, would make the most
14:19sense for Christians. Don't fall for false traditions that say the Holy Spirit is masculine
14:25based on scripturally improperly translated grammar, because that's false.
14:31Thank you, Dr. Thiel. For more interviews with Dr. Thiel, in addition to written as well as
14:36audio articles, visit our website at biblenewsprophecy.net.
14:41This is Steve Dupuy for the Bible News Prophecy Program.