Range and Context

In the SBL Greek New Testament (SBLGNT), John 3:8 begins τὸ πνεῦμα ὅπου θέλει πνεῖ (to pneuma hopou thelei pnei, the wind blows where it wishes) and ends οὕτως ἐστὶν πᾶς ὁ γεγεννημένος ἐκ τοῦ πνεύματος (houtōs estin pas ho gegennēmenos ek tou pneumatos, so it is with everyone born of the Spirit). The same noun, πνεῦμα, stands at both ends of the verse, and the verb in the middle, πνεῖ (pnei, blows), is from its own family. A Greek hearer did not hear wind and then Spirit. He heard one word twice, and had to work out what Jesus was doing with it.

What Jesus is doing is drawing a comparison that only works because the word can carry both senses. You cannot see the wind, cannot command it and cannot say where it starts, but you can hear it and see what it moves. The new birth is like that, because it is the work of the πνεῦμα of God. In English the translator must choose a word at each end, and the BSB, with nearly every English Bible, chooses wind first and Spirit last. That is the right choice for an English sentence, and it means an English reader loses the very thing that makes the saying memorable.

Two small details show how much a translation decides. First, the word for its in its sound is αὐτοῦ (autou), neuter, because πνεῦμα is a neuter noun. Grammatical gender in Greek is a fact about words, not about persons or things, so the neuter here tells you nothing either way about whether the Spirit is personal; that question is settled from other evidence, such as the Spirit who teaches, testifies and can be grieved. Second, the capital S in Spirit is the translator's. The early manuscripts were written in capital letters throughout, with no distinction like the one English makes between spirit and Spirit, so every capital S in your Bible is an interpretation, usually a correct one, made by the translators.

The verse is not alone. The whole conversation with Nicodemus runs on words with two senses. In 3:3 and 3:7 Jesus says a person must be born ἄνωθεν (anōthen), which can mean again or from above; Nicodemus hears again, and asks how a man can enter his mother's womb a second time (3:4). Jesus seems to mean from above, and the new birth is also a second birth, so both senses may be in play. John's Gospel uses this kind of misunderstanding often, with the living water in 4:10-15 and with Lazarus's sleep in 11:11-13, and section 5 will ask how a reader can tell when a double meaning is intended.

A lexicon entry is a map of the ways a word has been used. It is not a list of meanings all present at once, and it is not a ranking from the true meaning down to the lesser ones. Every sense on the map was found in real sentences, and every new sentence chooses from the map. The error of pouring the whole map into one sentence is the one James Barr called illegitimate totality transfer, which Module 2 warned against and the Hermeneutics lesson Word Studies Done Properly named; the error of picking a sense from the map because you like it is just as common.

πνεῦμα has one of the widest maps in the New Testament, and it occurs 379 times. It can be the wind (John 3:8; Hebrews 1:7, He makes His angels winds). It can be breath, as in the breath of His mouth in 2 Thessalonians 2:8. It can be the life a person breathes out at death: Jesus yielded up His spirit (Matthew 27:50; John 19:30). It can be the inner life of a human being, as when The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit (Romans 8:16). It can be a spirit being, including an evil one, a man with an unclean spirit (Mark 1:23), or a ghost: a spirit does not have flesh and bones (Luke 24:39). And most often of all it is the Holy Spirit, as in the first words of Romans 8:16.

Behind that range stands the Hebrew רוּחַ (ruach, wind, breath, spirit), which has the same spread of senses, and the Septuagint, which usually renders ruach with πνεῦμα. A Jewish reader of the first century already knew a word that moved between wind and Spirit, as Ezekiel 37 shows. Greek also had other words when a writer wanted to be unambiguous. The ordinary word for a wind is ἄνεμος (anemos, wind), 31 times, the wind of the storms on the lake. At Pentecost, Luke describes a sound like a mighty rushing wind (Acts 2:2) with yet another word, πνοή (pnoē, breath, gust), and keeps πνεῦμα for the Holy Spirit two verses later. Whatever his reason, the choice shows a writer who could avoid the double sense when he wished.

A second word shows how far a range can stretch inside one writer. κόσμος (kosmos, world, order, adornment) occurs 185 times in the SBLGNT, 78 of them in John's Gospel and 23 in 1 John. In John 3:16 God so loved the world; in 1 John 2:15 John says Do not love the world or anything in the world. The same writer uses the same word for the object of God's love and for something believers must not love, and he does not contradict himself, because the sentences point to different senses: the human race in its need in the first, the human order organised against God in the second, as 1 John 2:16 goes on to describe it. Peter uses the same word in a far older sense, for a woman's adornment of braided hair and gold (1 Peter 3:3), where the BSB renders it outward adornment; English cosmetic comes from the same Greek family. How far the world in John 3:16 reaches is a further question, about the scope of God's saving purpose, and the Systematic Theology lesson Election takes up the question of how God loves the world. The lexical point stands either way: the word's sense is chosen by its sentence.

So a range is not a problem to be solved once. It is a set of possibilities that every sentence narrows, and the reader's job is to see how. The next two sections show that work on a word whose range causes more confusion in preaching than almost any other.

σάρξ (sarx, flesh) occurs 147 times in the SBLGNT, 26 of them in Romans and 18 in Galatians, and its senses run from the butcher's shop to the battle between the old age and the new. At one end it is the soft substance of a body: Not all flesh is the same (1 Corinthians 15:39), and the risen Jesus says a ghost has no flesh and bones (Luke 24:39). It can name family and descent: Jesus was a descendant of David according to the flesh (Romans 1:3). It can mean a human being or all humanity, in a Hebrew way of speaking: Romans 3:20 has οὐ δικαιωθήσεται πᾶσα σὰρξ (ou dikaiōthēsetai pasa sarx, all flesh will not be justified), which the BSB rightly renders no one will be justified. It can mean the whole of human nature, taken by the Son: Καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο (Kai ho logos sarx egeneto, and the Word became flesh, John 1:14). It can mean merely human ways of judging, as when Paul says we regard no one according to the flesh (2 Corinthians 5:16).

And then there is the sense that belongs especially to Paul, in which flesh stands against the Spirit: For the flesh craves what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh (Galatians 5:17). Here σάρξ is not the body. The list of its acts in 5:19-21 includes idolatry, hatred, discord, jealousy and factions, and the same Paul calls the body a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). It is something like human life turned away from God and unable to please him (Romans 8:7-8), and Paul's phrase κατὰ σάρκα (kata sarka, according to the flesh) can be neutral in one verse, as in Romans 1:3, and a description of a way of life opposed to God in another, as in Romans 8:4. James Dunn, in The Theology of Paul the Apostle (1998), described Paul's uses as a spectrum, running from the neutral to the negative, and the image is a good one for a student: you must place each use on the spectrum by its sentence.

That is why the translation of σάρξ is genuinely debated, and both sides have a case. The 1984 New International Version rendered many of Paul's uses as sinful nature, and its 2011 revision returned to flesh in most of them; the BSB mostly keeps flesh, though in Romans 8:3 it renders the phrase likeness of sinful man. The case for a functional rendering is that flesh in modern English suggests the body, and a reader who sees the flesh opposed to the Spirit will easily conclude that the body is evil, which Paul never taught. Sinful nature tells him at once what kind of thing Paul means. The case for keeping flesh is that Paul's word is deliberately elastic and links his uses together, so that a reader who sees flesh in Romans 1:3, 8:3 and 8:4 can see Paul's argument moving across one word; and that nature imports an interpretation, that the flesh is a part or faculty inside a person.

That last point matters because interpreters do not agree on what kind of thing Paul's flesh is. Many in the Reformed, Lutheran and Wesleyan traditions speak of the flesh as the sinful disposition that remains in a believer and wars against the new life, and they read Galatians 5:17 and Romans 7:18 that way. Others, especially in recent scholarship, read Paul's flesh and Spirit as two powers or two ages in conflict, the old age of sin and death and the new age begun by Christ, so that to be ἐν σαρκὶ (en sarki, in the flesh, Romans 8:9, which the BSB renders controlled by the flesh) is to belong to the old order rather than to have a bad part inside; J. Louis Martyn's commentary on Galatians in the Anchor Bible (1997) is a strong statement of this reading. The two views are not always opposed, and many writers combine them. The point for a student is that the English word you choose will lean one way, and you should know which way it leans.

Context is not a vague feeling about a passage. It is a set of specific things a reader can check, and checking them in order will settle most questions of range. First, list the senses. Use the lexicon in your tool, and add what you have seen in your own concordance work, so that you are choosing from real possibilities and not from one you remember from a sermon.

Second, look at the company the word keeps. Words are known by their neighbours. Born of the Spirit, walk according to the flesh, the acts of the flesh, flesh and bones, the Word became flesh: each phrase narrows the word before you have read another sentence. A verb that something does, a preposition it follows, a noun it is joined to, all cut the range down.

Third, look for the contrast term, because writers define words by what they set against them. In Luke 24:39, πνεῦμα is set against flesh and bones, so it is a ghost, a bodiless being. In Galatians 5:17, σάρξ is set against the Spirit of God, so it cannot simply be the body, which the Spirit indwells. In John 3:6, Flesh is born of flesh, but spirit is born of the Spirit, the contrast is between ordinary human birth and birth from God.

Fourth, prefer the same writer's usage, and do not carry one writer's sense into another's. John 3:6 is a good warning. John's flesh in that verse is ordinary human birth and the human condition, as in John 1:14, not Paul's flesh opposed to the Spirit in Galatians 5; to read Paul's sense into John would make Jesus say something John does not mean. Fifth, decide, and write down why. A study that ends with every sense still open has not finished. A study that ends with one sense chosen and three reasons given has done its work, and can be checked by someone else.

Sixth and last, ask whether the text itself gives signals that the writer means more than one sense. Usually it does not, and then you choose one. Sometimes it does, and that is the subject of the next section.

Illegitimate totality transfer is an error because writers usually mean one thing at a time. But usually is not always, and John is the New Testament writer who most often means two. The test is not whether a double meaning would be beautiful, since any preacher can make one sound beautiful, but whether the text signals that it is there.

There are three kinds of signal to look for. The first is a misunderstanding in the story that turns on the word, as when Nicodemus hears ἄνωθεν as again (3:4), or the Samaritan woman hears living water as running water (4:11), or the disciples hear Lazarus's sleep as rest (11:12). The second is an explanation by the narrator. Jesus says that when he is lifted up, from ὑψόω (hypsoō, to lift up, exalt), he will draw everyone to himself (12:32), and John adds, He said this to indicate the kind of death He was going to die (12:33): the word means both raised on a cross and exalted, and John has told you so. Compare 3:14, where the Son of Man must be lifted up as Moses lifted the snake. The third is a saying that only works if both senses are heard, which is the case with John 3:8.

Where there is no such signal, be careful. John 19:30 says that Jesus παρέδωκεν τὸ πνεῦμα (paredōken to pneuma, handed over the spirit), which the BSB renders yielded up His spirit. Some readers have heard in it a hint that Jesus, in dying, gave the Spirit, since the verb can mean to hand over and John has promised the Spirit after Jesus' glorification (7:39). Others answer that handing over one's spirit is a natural way of describing death, as in Matthew 27:50, and that John narrates the giving of the Spirit separately, in 20:22. Both readings have been held by careful commentators. The test from this section is to ask what in 19:30 itself signals a second sense, and to say honestly that the signal is disputed.

So the rule this lesson gives is a rule with an honest exception. Let the sentence choose one sense from the range, and give your reasons. Allow two senses only when the text shows you that it intends them, and then say what showed you. That rule will keep you from both of the common failures: the preacher who loads every sense into every word, and the reader who refuses to see a wordplay a Gospel writer has gone out of his way to make.

Choose two or three words from your passage that carry weight, perhaps one from your Words to study list and one common word that your passage seems to use in a particular way. On a fresh page, for each word, do three things. First, write its range: the senses your tool's lexicon gives, each with one New Testament reference, so that you have a small map. Second, write the sentence from your passage it stands in, and underline the company it keeps and any contrast term.

Third, choose the sense you think the sentence requires, and write two or three reasons from the steps in section 4: its neighbours, its contrast, the same writer's usage elsewhere. If you think your passage means two senses at once, write down what signal in the text shows it; if you cannot find one, choose one sense and note the other as a possibility you have set aside.

Then open your passage in three translations, the BSB and two others your tools offer, and see whether they render each word the same way. Where they differ, write which sense each translation has chosen. You will often find that the translations have already made the decision you have just made, and now you can say why they made it, which was the aim of this track from its first lesson.