pneuma

This is the literal, physical root from which every other use of the word grows. The word was built from a verb meaning "to blow" or "to breathe," so at bottom it simply names air in motion, whether the wind outside or the breath in a person's lungs.

This plain physical sense is actually rare in the New Testament. The writers reach for the word far more often in its higher senses, but they never forget the picture underneath it. When Jesus says the wind blows where it wishes and no one can track it, he is leaning on exactly this image to talk about something unseen and uncontrollable.

Because Greek used one word where English uses three (wind, breath, spirit), a verse can hover between them on purpose. The same blowing-air picture lets a writer slide from the breath of a body to the breath of God without changing the word.

Here the word names something inside a human being rather than the open air. It covers the breath of life that makes a body alive, and it covers the inner self, the part of a person that is aware, that can be troubled or glad, and that reaches out toward God.

These two are held together on purpose, because in the thought-world behind the New Testament a person's life and a person's inner self are the same God-given breath, not two separate compartments. So the same word that says a body without breath is dead can also say a person worships, prays, or is stirred up in their spirit.

It is easy to read a later three-part picture of human beings (body, soul, spirit) back into this word, but most scholars warn against that. When Paul prays that someone's spirit, soul, and body be kept whole, he is piling up words to say the whole person, not mapping out the parts of human nature.

The word also names beings that have no physical body. Most often in the Gospels and Acts these are hostile spirits, called unclean or evil, that seize and torment people and are driven out by Jesus and his followers. The same word can also name a good angel, a ghost the frightened disciples think they are seeing, or spirits gathered before God's throne.

What ties these together is not whether they are good or evil but that they are real, personal, non-bodily beings. The fixed phrases "unclean spirit" and "evil spirit" mark the hostile ones, and the New Testament treats casting them out as a sign that God's reign has arrived.

These spirits are clearly distinguished from God's own Spirit. Luke in particular sets them in sharp opposition: Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, confronts and overpowers the unclean spirits. The reader is meant to hear the same word and feel the contrast.

This is by far the most common use of the word in the New Testament, accounting for more than half of all its occurrences. It names God's own Spirit, the Holy Spirit: God present and at work, the power by which Jesus is conceived, anointed, and raised, and the gift poured out on his people to make them new, to empower their witness, and to bind them to Christ.

The sense reaches back through the Greek Old Testament to the Hebrew word for breath and wind (רוח), which already named God's life-giving, empowering presence rather than a thing made of some heavenly material. The New Testament writers fill the word with that Hebrew background while writing in Greek, which is why God's Spirit can be described almost in physical terms (poured out, breathed, indwelling) and yet remains personal.

Across the New Testament the Spirit is increasingly spoken of as someone, not merely something: the Spirit intercedes, distributes gifts as he chooses, speaks, forbids, can be grieved and lied to, teaches, reminds, bears witness, and convicts. The personal portrayal is strongest in John, where Jesus calls the Spirit another helper who carries on his own work. Scholars debate how far first-century writers had worked this out, but agree the Spirit is consistently tied to the saving act of God in Christ.