Grammatical gender is rather ordinary in most languages but completely absent from English. In English, men are he/him, women are she/her, and everything else is an it. Because English follows a sort of “natural gender,” English speakers often believe gender in other languages also denotes the sex or personhood of what is being discussed. If a noun in another language is masculine, for example, English speakers assume it denotes a human male.
Grammatical gender is merely a type of grammatical designation. In Spanish, for example, the word for a lady’s dress is el vestido, which is masculine, while the word for a man’s necktie is la corbata, which is feminine. This seems totally absurd to English speakers because a lady’s dress should obviously be feminine and the necktie, masculine!
In my opinion, it’s unfortunate we even use the word gender to describe it. It might help native-English speakers if we imagine the word class when talking about gender. For example, instead of saying masculine nouns, we could say class-M nouns. SInce this blog is written in English, I’m assuming the people who read it also speak English so grouping nouns into classes instead of gender might help you as you think about this post.
Spanish only has two genders: masculine and feminine. There is no neuter gender in Spanish. However, Greek has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter. Since the New Testament was written in Greek and since English uses he, she, and it, the tendency to project our English understanding of gender onto the text becomes almost irresistible. Therefore, problems sometimes arise when people try to use the gender of a Greek word to make a doctrinal point.
A blog that calls itself Examining the Trinity has pointed out that the Holy Spirit in the original Greek is neuter. They went on to say this:
But "Holy Spirit" in the original Greek is neuter and therefore the neuter pronouns "it," "itself" are used with it in the original NT Greek! Any strictly literal Bible translation would have to use "it" for the holy spirit (since it is really not a person, but God's active force, a literal translation would be helpful in this case).
This is an extremely amateurish argument. It demonstrates how a little knowledge can be dangerous. Most people who use this argument really can't read Greek. Instead, they have heard once that the Greek word for “Spirit” is neuter so, because of their understanding of English, they buy into the argument that the Spirit is an “it.” Of course, there are some people who indeed understand Greek's grammatical use of gender but still repeat the argument with the intention of preying on the audience's ignorance of the subject.
First, this is a blatant example of special pleading because the same people who raise this argument don't apply this same standard everywhere. In Matthew 2:11, for example, the Bible says the wise men, “saw the young child with Mary his mother.” The Greek word for child here (paidion, παιδίον, Strong’s word 3813) is neuter so, to be consistent, they should translate this verse as “they saw the young child with Mary its mother.” Of course they don't do that. Neither do they refer to the church as her or the book as him or “correctly” render the hundred other instances where Greek gender does not agree with English ideas of gender.
There's another subtle flaw in the above quote that might escape notice. The author seems unaware of the flaw and cites a source that commits the same mistake. See if you can spot it in this quote:
The Greek word for 'spirit' is neuter, and while we use personal pronouns in English ('he,' 'his,' 'him'), most Greek manuscripts employ 'it.' [bold in original]
Did you catch it? If not, don't feel bad because it's sort of a technicality and some might accuse me of splitting hairs. However, I feel it's an important consideration. This quote says, “most Greek manuscripts employ 'it.'” The reality is that NO Greek manuscript contains the word, it! The word it is an English word which conveys a certain meaning in English. It is more precise to say that the Greek manuscripts use the neuter pronoun (auton) whenever the antecedent is a neuter noun. The original authors were not thinking “it” whenever they wrote "auton." Again, think, “class” instead of gender and it might help. Class-N nouns use class-N pronouns.
A language is more than its vocabulary; each language also has its own grammar as well as its own idioms. The goal of any translation is to express the same meaning in the target language that is conveyed in the original language. A good translation should obey the rules of the target language – not slavishly render a hyper-literal, word for word exchange of the original language. The pronouns used in our translations should follow the rules of English, not Greek! If the antecedent is an object, the English pronoun should be it. If the antecedent is a person, the English pronoun should be he or she.
If anyone wants to deny the Personhood of the Holy Spirit, he must make his case using Scripture. A weak appeal to the gender of a Greek word – especially an appeal made by someone who can't even read Greek – isn't even close.
