Pneuma or Spirit? A Question of Translation and Context

Rethinking Pneuma in Paul

　　When the Apostle Paul wrote πνεῦμα, what did he have in mind? For most modern readers, the answer seems straightforward: human or holy spirit, that is, the Third Person of the Trinity, a divine agent of comfort, conviction, and power. This theological reading is so natural that it feels obvious, and it is almost instinctive to readers and translators. But recently, this translation has been challenged. This article seeks to discuss what those objections are and explore the possibility of translating πνεῦμα differently.

　　The history of modern scholarship shows a persistent tension between theological and historical approaches. In the early 20th century, Hermann Gunkel proposed dichotomies that separated Pauline pneuma from its Old Testament and Hellenistic Jewish roots and framed it as “supernatural” versus natural. This move proved to be influential as this framework was adopted by important figures like Rudolf Bultmann and Ernst Käsemann, whose deeply Lutheran readings further solidified a “spiritualizing” interpretation that prioritized inner, subjective religious experience. In this stream of scholarship, pneuma became synonymous with the inner life of faith, often at the expense of its cosmic and corporeal dimensions.

　　At the end of the 20th century, a significant corrective emerged, with scholars who insisted on a more historically grounded, “physicalist” reading. Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body (1995) was groundbreaking, showing how Paul’s audience understood bodies and spirits within a holistic ancient cosmology where the physical and spiritual were intertwined. Troels Engberg-Pedersen then argued in Cosmology and Self in the Apostle Paul (2010) for reading Pauline pneuma through a Stoic lens, as the cosmic, intelligent “breath” that constitutes and unifies all matter. These works represent a major shift, taking Paul’s materialism seriously. This means setting aside our post-Cartesian idea of “spirit” as a non-material, private feeling, and recovering the ancient, concrete understanding of pneuma as a physical substance. For these scholars, the most helpful key to this recovery is Stoic philosophy, the dominant intellectual framework of Paul’s Greco-Roman world.

Why a Stoic, Material Pneuma?

　　For the Stoics, pneuma is not a ghost or immaterial being. It is the cosmic life-force, an intelligent mixture of air and fire that permeates and structures the universe. It is the tension in a rope, the growth in a plant, the rational mind of a human, and the substance of the stars. This pneuma is divine, rational, and utterly material. It constitutes a hierarchy of being, from dense rocks to rarified gods, with no unbridgeable chasm between the physical and the divine.

　　Engberg-Pedersen argues that Paul’s audiences—Jew and Gentile alike—breathed this intellectual air. When Paul spoke of pneuma, they would have heard echoes of this cosmic, animating substance. The automatic translation of pneuma as a disembodied “Spirit” is therefore an anachronism, importing a modern mind/body dualism that would have been foreign to Paul. To read him correctly, Engberg-Pedersen contends, we must take his physical language literally: pneuma is a stuff that can be poured, drunk, and infused; it transforms the believer from the inside out via a tangible, physiological reality.

　　Viewing pneuma through this Stoic, materialist lens dramatically reshapes how we read familiar passages. Consider first Paul’s discussion of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15:44-45. Here Paul contrasts the “natural body” (σῶμα ψυχικόν) sown in death with the “spiritual body” (σῶμα πνευματικόν) raised in life, culminating in his striking declaration that the risen Christ became a “life-giving pneuma.” The conventional reading understands the “spiritual body” as a glorified, immortal body oriented by the Holy Spirit, with Christ either possessing the Spirit or being accompanied by him. But Engberg-Pedersen offers a different perspective by connecting this passage to Paul’s earlier mention of heavenly bodies like the sun and moon in 1 Corinthians 15:40-41. He argues that for Paul, a σῶμα πνευματικόν is a body actually made of pneuma-stuff, analogous to the Stoic understanding of stars as composed of this refined, divine substance. Thus Christ, as the “last Adam,” has not merely received the Spirit; rather, his resurrected mode of existence is pneuma itself. He becomes the source of that life-giving, material substance that will ultimately reconstitute believers. In this reading, resurrection is not merely a restoration of life but a physical transformation into an entirely new, pneumatic order of being.

　　A second example comes from Romans 5:5, where Paul writes that “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit (pneuma) who has been given to us” (NIV). The conventional reading takes this as a beautiful metaphor for the internal, emotional assurance of God’s love provided by the Holy Spirit. But the materialist reading reveals something more literal. Following ancient medical theories known as Pneumatism, pneuma was understood as an external substance drawn into the body through breathing, processed by the heart, and then channeled through the arteries to govern thoughts and actions. When Paul speaks of pneuma being “poured into our hearts,” he may be describing an actual physiological process: the divine pneuma is literally infused into the cardiac centre of the believer, physically altering his/her constitution and enabling him/her to act in accordance with God’s love. The change, in this view, is simultaneously cognitive and corporeal—a transformation of the whole person, inside and out.

Scholarly Pushback: Two Major Critiques

　　While this view is gaining momentum, this materialist thesis has faced criticism from other leading scholars. John Barclay and John Levison pinpoint two major tensions in Engberg-Pedersen’s proposal.

　　Barclay argues that Engberg-Pedersen’s model, for all its philosophical precision, misses the core of Paul’s theology: the radical, disruptive newness of the Christ event. For Paul, the pneuma is not a pre-existing cosmic substance simply transferred from heaven to earth. It is an unprecedented, eschatological entity unleashed by Christ’s resurrection, a “new creation” (2 Cor 5:17). Regarding 1 Corinthians 15, Barclay disputes the claim that “heavenly bodies” such as the sun, moon, and stars are explicitly called “pneumatic.” Paul’s point, he contends, is God’s power to give each its own kind of body, not to outline a Stoic scala naturae or hierarchy of being. The “life-giving pneuma” in verse 45 is the power of resurrection itself, not a higher-grade cosmic material. To reduce it to Stoic physics, Barclay warns, is to turn the resurrection into a mere “reordering of already-existing cosmic elements.”

　　However, it is important to avoid imposing modern, dualist categories of “spiritual vs. material” onto Paul altogether. As such, to transliterate pneuma is precisely a tool to suspend our theological assumptions long enough to hear Paul on his own terms. Using this tool, we can see that Paul describes the new life in Christ using the best available language of his day for a transformative power, namely, the language of a divine, life-altering substance. This does not require us to claim that Paul was a Stoic or that the pneuma is “just” medical pneuma. It simply asserts that this was the conceptual tool Paul employed to articulate the very ineffable newness that Barclay wants to protect. The “newness” resides in the salvific action of God in Christ; the mechanism of description, however, is the contemporary materialist framework of the first-century world.

　　Levison, for his part, agrees that pneuma has a concrete dimension but charges Engberg-Pedersen with a selective and sometimes strained use of Stoicism, while neglecting the richer parallels in Paul’s Jewish heritage. He raises two specific concerns. First, the Stoic models Engberg-Pedersen employs, such as the cosmic conflagration (ἔκπυρωσις) or a passing comment from Cicero on divination, do not convincingly explain the ongoing, transformative work of pneuma in believers. Meanwhile, actual Stoic accounts of inspiration, such as those describing the oracle at Delphi, portray pneuma as a terrestrial vapor or breeze, not as a substance flowing through preached words. Second, and more centrally, Levison points to the dearth of engagement with Jewish texts where pneuma is also depicted as both concrete and cognitive. He cites the “spirit” placed upon the elders to govern (Nm 11:25), the “excellent spirit” of wisdom in Daniel (Dn 5:12), and the spirit that besieges Elihu, forcing out wise speech (Jb 32:18-20). The Dead Sea Scrolls, too, present a community transformed and granted knowledge by the spirit. For Levison, this Jewish matrix provides a more direct and likely foreground for Paul’s thinking than an abstracted Stoic physics.

　　Setting aside Levison’s misguided dichotomy of Judaism and the Greco-Roman world (see Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism, which has become a scholarly consensus; one cannot separate Judaism from its surrounding culture), there is a way to honor Levison’s concerns while retaining materialist insight. Medicine, after all, was a shared cultural vernacular across the Hellenistic world, including Judea. A Hellenistic Jew like Paul could easily integrate the Jewish concept of ruach (understood as God’s powerful, life-giving breath) with contemporary medical understandings of pneuma as an animating bodily substance. To argue for a “medical” pneuma, then, is not to choose “Greek” over “Jewish.” Rather, it is to identify the common intellectual currency through which Jewish theological concepts could be understood in physical terms. This provides a more satisfying answer to Levison’s critique: the physicality of pneuma in Paul needs not come exclusively from Stoic philosophy. It could just as plausibly emerge from the synthesis of Jewish theology and the widespread biomedical concepts that permeated the ancient Mediterranean world, not dissimilar from what Philo did in his work.

Synthesis: What Is at Stake?

　　Here we must acknowledge that pneuma may indeed carry Stoic connotations. Engberg-Pedersen correctly observes that for Paul’s first-century audience, the word pneuma would have evoked a material, cosmic, life-giving substance. Yet we must also attend to the limits of Engberg-Pedersen’s argument. The pneuma in Paul’s letters is not merely Stoic cosmic matter. Certain passages attribute unmistakably personal actions to pneuma: it “intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words” (Rom 8:26 NABS); it “apportions to each one individually as he wills” (1 Cor 12:11 ESV); it can be “grieved” (Eph 4:30). These are not things that a mere material “substance” can do; they imply a person with emotions, will, and relational capacity. To reduce pneuma entirely to Stoic matter is to miss this crucial personal dimension in Paul’s theology.

　　Thus, Engberg-Pedersen’s thesis requires correction, not wholesale acceptance. He rightly alerts us to the material dimension of pneuma, but his model overemphasizes Stoic continuity and fails to fully account for the personhood Paul attributes to pneuma and the radical newness introduced by the Christ event. For careful readers, the path to the richest understanding may lie precisely in holding this tension: recognizing the concrete, material connotations of pneuma in its ancient context while also acknowledging its personal role in Paul’s letters.

Taking the Debate Seriously

　　An important clarification is necessary here: we need not fully accept Engberg-Pedersen’s thesis, nor must we claim that Paul was a Stoic, in order to benefit from this discussion (in fact, Engberg-Pedersen never made such a claim). As Christians, if we care about God’s word, in this case what Paul actually said, we must remain open to the possibility that our understanding of pneuma may be incomplete and need correction or enrichment. Engberg-Pedersen’s argument may not be entirely correct, but he has raised a question worth taking seriously: Have our modern cultural assumptions caused us to miss certain dimensions of what Paul originally intended to communicate?

　　Transliterating pneuma is precisely the tool that helps us take this question seriously. It does not force us to accept any particular conclusion, but rather creates a space where we can pause and ask: “What did Paul mean when he used the word pneuma here?” This questioning is an act of greater faithfulness to Scripture. It acknowledges that God’s revelation may be richer and deeper than we have yet understood, and it allows the biblical text to challenge us rather than merely confirming what we already think we know.

　　It is worth noting that this practice of transliterating pneuma is particularly compelling in the case of Paul’s letters. This is because we can identify with reasonable specificity both Paul’s audience (communities of Jews and Gentiles in the first-century Greco-Roman world) and his historical context (a period when Stoicism and medical theories were prevalent). In this particular historical setting, Paul’s listeners would have understood pneuma in ways far closer to the word’s rich cultural connotations than modern readers do. Therefore, at least in the case of Paul’s letters, using the transliteration pneuma rather than translating it as “Spirit” can better help us avoid anachronism and more faithfully hear what Paul intended to communicate.

Conclusion

　　In the end, transliterating pneuma is not an act of laziness or an evasion of the translator’s task. It is an expression of deeper faithfulness to the text. It invites us into an ongoing exploration, allowing Paul himself to tell us what his pneuma truly means. In the course of this exploration, we come to know better not only Paul but also the God who spoke through him.