G4151

• {"n":"John 3:8","s":"The wind blows where it wills. Wind and Spirit are the same Greek word, and the sentence needs both at once.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=john-3-8","r":"John 3:8","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Every version reads wind in the first half and Spirit in the second, because there is no alternative. A few footnote that the Greek is one word."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Suppose your language had one word for **a breeze** and **a person's inner life**. A sentence could slide from one to the other and land as a single thought. Translate it into English and you get two nouns and a jump."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Pneuma covers wind, breath and spirit. So does Hebrew ruach. Jesus is saying one thing about one word: it goes where it wants, you hear it, you cannot track it, and that is what being born of it is like. In Greek the comparison is a single image. In English it is a simile between two unrelated things."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English split what Greek and Hebrew both kept together, so a pun becomes an analogy and loses most of its force."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When a verse compares two things that share a word in the original, it is usually not a comparison at all. It is one word doing two jobs, and the translation has manufactured the gap."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"No translator has an option. The only decision is whether to footnote it, and most do not."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u03c0\u03bd\u03b5\u1fe6\u03bc\u03b1 pneuma \u00b7 G4151"}],"src":["pneuma as wind at Hebrews 1:7 quoting Psalm 104:4","Hebrew ruach carries the identical range; see Ezekiel 37","Nicodemus is a teacher of Israel, verse 10, so the Hebrew word is assumed background"]}
• {"n":"John 4:24","s":"God is spirit. Same construction as the last clause of John 1:1, and here nobody reads it as a god.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=john-4-24","r":"John 4:24","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"The King James reads a Spirit. Every modern version reads God is spirit, with no article at all, which is the qualitative rendering."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"**Sam is the doctor.** **Sam is a doctor.** **Sam is doctor.** The third one is not English, and it is what Greek does here. It says what God is by nature, not which spirit God is or that God is one of several."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Pneuma stands before the verb with no article, the same shape as theos in John 1:1c. Nobody proposes rendering it a god there and a spirit here, yet the King James did exactly that. Modern versions corrected it, which is the strongest available evidence for how the construction works."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English forces an article or a bare noun and the bare noun sounds ungrammatical in most sentences. Here it does not, which is why the fix was possible."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"When you want to test a grammatical claim, find the same construction in a verse where nothing theological is at stake. If translators handle it one way there and another way in the contested verse, the difference is not grammar."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"No modern version defends a Spirit. The King James rendering is the outlier, and correcting it is the same move that produces God was the Word rather than a god in chapter one."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u03c0\u03bd\u03b5\u1fe6\u03bc\u03b1 pneuma \u00b7 G4151"}],"src":["The same anarthrous preverbal predicate construction at John 1:1c","Philip Harner, \u201cQualitative Anarthrous Predicate Nouns,\u201d JBL 92 (1973): 75-87, treats both verses"]}
• {"n":"pneuma","s":"Spirit. The same noun means wind and breath, exactly like Hebrew ruach.","u":"https:\/\/jayms.com\/bible-study-tools-2\/bible-translation-differences\/#id=pneuma","r":"John 3:8","b":[{"l":"How modern translations read it","t":"Versions read spirit, Spirit, wind or breath according to context. One Greek word behind all of them."},{"l":"First, in plain English","t":"Imagine one word for **a breeze**, **a sigh** and **a person's inner life**. To a speaker of that language those are obviously the same thing. To you they are three drawers."},{"l":"What you are seeing","t":"Pneuma covers wind, breath and spirit, human and divine. The Septuagint uses it for Hebrew ruach, and the ranges match closely enough that New Testament writers can build arguments across both languages."},{"l":"Why translators split","t":"English split the three and capitalises one of them, which is a decision no Greek manuscript ever made."},{"l":"The rule to carry away","t":"Capitalisation of Spirit in an English New Testament is an interpretive choice. The manuscripts have no capitals at all."},{"l":"Choosing between them","t":"Spirit is the majority rendering; wind and breath appear where the context forces them."},{"l":"The word","t":"\u03c0\u03bd\u03b5\u1fe6\u03bc\u03b1 pneuma \u00b7 G4151"}],"src":["John 3:8 uses one word for both halves of the sentence","Hebrews 1:7 quoting Psalm 104:4","pneuma for ruach throughout the Septuagint"]}