About 400 years after the time of Christ, Jerome translated the Scriptures into Latin. This, the Vulgate, became part of the Bible, in fact it became the Bible of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1525, while England was still a Roman Catholic country, Tyndale produced his translation of the New Testament into English, followed some years later by the Old Testament.
Ten years after this Henry VIII broke with the Pope but the doctrines of the Church of England remained unaltered. Naturally every translation of the Scriptures was coloured considerably by the translators’ religious beliefs. Not deliberately, but because they knew no better. Tyndale made use of Greek and Hebrew Scriptures but he leaned heavily on the popular Latin Bible. Many of the Latin expressions had become so much part of the Roman Catholic Church services and therefore also of the Church of England, that Tyndale did not translate them into English, but following long established precedent, he simply took the Latin word and gave it an English dressing and put it into his scripture. And this is a habit which has been followed by most subsequent translators. We read of a “serpent”, which is Latin for “snake”. We kill a snake on Saturday but if we kill it on Sunday it is a serpent. “Tabernacle” — Latin for “tent”. We read in the Scripture, “the Tabernacles of the Moabites” — tents. And “virgins” instead of the English word “maidens”. We read of “Calvary” instead of “the skull” Golgotha. We read of the “Ark” of the Covenant, Ark being Latin for a cupboard or box. And there are other examples.
In Tyndale’s day, the English language was changing pretty rapidly and so it was only a few years later before Tyndale’s Bible was revised and brought up to date. There were, for example, the Bishops’ Bible widely used by the Church of England, then there was the Geneva Bible, a revision of Tyndale’s with a Protestant, non-conformist slant. Then about 1591, that is 66 years after Tyndale, and 20 years before King James’ version, was produced the Roman Catholic translation, a revision of Tyndale with a Roman Catholic slant.
Less than 20 years later, in 1611, there appeared the King James, or Authorised version. Not very different from the Roman Catholic one or the preceding translations, but with a Church of England slant.
All these revisions followed the precedent set by Tyndale of taking certain Latin words, giving them an English dressing and substituting them for the Hebrew or the Greek words. It is one of these Latin words which claims our attention now.
The Hebrew word “ruach”, the Greek word “pneuma”, and the Latin word “spiritus” all mean the same thing. Primarily, “air in motion” — in English we have to use two different words — one is “breath” and the other is “wind”. But in Hebrew, Greek and Latin it is the same word. The word “wind” indeed in English sometimes means “breath”. Babies suffer from “wind”. If the speaker talks too long we say he is “long winded”. And if what he says does not make sense, we say it is just a lot of “wind”. Let me emphasise, that “spirit” as used in the Bible is not really an English word, but merely the Latin for “breath” or “wind”. And we are entirely dependent upon the whim of the translators which word is used — “breath”, “wind” or “spirit”.
Translators of different versions do not agree, and therefore we are not bound to accept what they say — they might not be right.
In John 3:6, Jesus says, “That which is born of the pneuma is pneuma”, and then in verse 8, pneuma occurs again but the translators have to guess what to say. King James version following the other earlier ones says, “the wind bloweth”. The Roman Catholic version says, “the spirit breatheth”. Now which is right? You see in the Greek “wind” and “spirit” are the same word, and to “blow” and to “breathe” are the same.
Now turn to John 20:22 and we read in the King James version, “Jesus breathed on them and said, receive ye the Holy Ghost”. The word translated “breathed” is the same as the one translated “blows” in John 3:8. The word translated “Ghost” or “Spirit” is “pneuma”, the same word translated “wind” in John 3:8. You see the difficulty. According to Young’s Concordance, the Hebrew word “ruach” is translated “spirit” 232 times, “wind” 90 times, “breath” 28 times, and there are a few other variations. Now were the translators always right? The Greek word “pneuma” is translated “wind” only once in John chapter 3 that we have been looking at. And elsewhere it is consistently rendered, “spirit” or “ghost”.
Normally in the New Testament a different Greek word is used for “wind”, but not always. However, we note that when the Hebrew Old Testament was translated into Greek about 200 or 250 BC, the word “pneuma” was generally used to represent that Hebrew word “ruach”. So we can say that “reach” and “pneuma” mean the same — “wind” or “breath”. And it is a strange thing that although the word “breath” occurs so many times in the Old Testament in English translations, it occurs only once in King James’ New Testament and that is in Acts 17:25. In the N.E.B. it reads that “God is the universal giver of life, and breath, and health”. In that case the word is not actually “pneuma” but a derivative of the same word.
Now outside of the New Testament in other Greek writings “pneuma” has the meaning of “wind”, “breath”, “odour” and “scent” and we might point out that the normal meaning of that word “pneuma” is “breath” as we see it the word “pneumonia”, a disease of our breathing apparatus. And so that is the natural, ordinary meaning of the word “pneuma”. And I feel this, therefore, that wherever we come across the word “spirit” in the Scripture, we should stop and think, “why did the translators not simply say ‘breath’?” Especially we remember that their use of the word is a relic of Roman Catholic dogma.
Figurative Or Literal
In the Scripture the basic idea of “breath” is extended from our natural breath to take on many figurative meanings; and we should remember that they are figurative. Thus our words or our voices are carried on our breath, and hence “ruach”, “pneuma” and “spirit” can all mean “speech”. If you turn to 1 Kings 10:5, an occasion when the Queen of Sheba saw Solomon’s wealth we read that there was no more “ruach” in her. And our translators just say, no more “spirit” in her’. Well, what it really means, I think, is that the sight of all that wealth left her breathless” — “speechless” — a very common expression in our language. And then in Acts 9:7, to take a New Testament example, in that familiar passage where Jesus met Saul on the road to Damascus we read that the men with him were “speechless”, literally without any “pncuma” whatever that means — “speechless”.
If we turn to 1 John 4:1, and this is a most interesting chapter, we read “Do not trust any and every spirit, my friends, test the spirits.” Now here you see these “pneuma” these “breaths”, it means these “speeches” the “speakers”, the words they utter. In other words, do not believe everything you hear, but test what they say. And that is a very good principle and I suggest too that we should apply it to our English translations of the Scriptures sometimes, particularly when they use the word “spirit”. Stop and think, have they got it right?
Further figurative extension is to the thinking of the mind or the brain, in which these words originate. For example, we have those very familiar words of David in Psalm 51, “Create in me a clean heart, 0 God; and renew a right spirit (ruach, breath) within me”. “A right spirit” — we might say “a proper frame of mind”, so that we can “think” straight. We are getting away from “breath” now to something which causes the word to be brought unto our breath. We get something similar in Proverbs 17:27. “A man of understanding is of excellent spirit”, so says the authorised version, but the N.E.B. I think has got the right idea when it says that “He keeps a cool head”. “An excellent spirit” — “a cool head”. You see, what you are thinking. And then they have that comment by Jesus in Matt. 26:41, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak”. The “pneuma” is willing. And here you have got the thoughts or intentions in the brain — they are good but they do not get carried out. And so it would seem that this idea of a “frame of mind” is the most common usage of this word “spirit”. We have a “broken spirit”, a “contrite spirit”, in fact I have looked through some of our hymns and we find this meaning of the word “spirit” is very common.
If you turn to the Scriptures again and check chapter by chapter right through the book of the Acts you will be surprised at the number of occasions on which disciples and even apostles were given special power just by the laying on of hands. The apostle Paul received it at the hands of a specially appointed apostle, Ananias. Ananias laid his hands on Paul, and Paul received the power. If you read carefully Paul’s letters to Timothy you will find that Timothy’s powers were given to him by the laying on of the hands of the elders, specifically by Paul himself. And that is a most important thing to remember, that the powers of the Holy Spirit that we read of in the New Testament are given only by the laying on of hands of the apostles except in those three cases, and by nobody else. Paul told the Corinthians that the time would come when those gifts would cease. In course of time the apostles died and there was nobody else to have the power to lay hands and confer those gifts. And so you would expect the gifts would cease.
Turn to the closing verse of Matthew 28, and what you read there entirely depends upon what translation you read. The A.V. tells us that Jesus says, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world”. The literal translation of the Greek is, “I am with you all the days until the completion of the age”. “The end of the world” means “the completion of the age”, and Dr. Thomas in Eureka points out that the end of the age, the Greek word, “aion” refers to the end of the Mosaic age, the Jewish age, which took place round about the year 68-70 AD, 40 years after the crucifixion.
Dr. Thomas says that all that Jesus was promising them was that he would be with them until the destruction of Jerusalem which he had already predicted in his Olivet prophecy. And so Dr. Thomas says that after the destruction of Jerusalem we hear no more of the apostles —no record of miracles performed after the destruction of Jerusalem. We only hear of John in Patmos and he was not working miracles there either; he was just given the power of speech. And so we find the end of the age. Numerous references in the New Testament refer to the end of the age, the end of the world — not so much our time but the end of the Jewish age; and Dr. Thomas points out that the powers — the gifts of the Holy Spirit — ceased.
Concluding Thought
And so I suggest, to sum up the position, that though we cannot expect to receive the literal gifts of the Holy Spirit because nobody has the power to lay hands on us and give it to us, we should still be able to have within our minds those figurative gifts. We could have the spirit of Christ within us. We can have the spirit of God within us. We can have Christ in us, the Hope of Glory. We can have God in us, as the apostle John says. And so let us conclude, Brethren and Sisters, by reminding you again, that much of the New Testament is figurative. We want to bear that in mind, and when brethren use figurative expressions, please do not take them literally and then find fault with them. Doing so is not the spirit of Christ.
The Solution