Francesca Stavrakopoulou: Paul and ‘Pneuma’

Francesca Stavrakopoulou, God: An Anatomy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), 409.

Writing in Greek, Paul’s term for ‘spirit’ is pneuma, which was as elastic as its Hebrew and Aramaic counterparts, so that it could also mean ‘breath’ or ‘wind’. For most first-century philosophers, pneuma was not the abstract immateriality of Platonic theory, but an airy yet material substance pervading the cosmos, much as Stoic thinkers imagined. Its fiery heat and dynamism gave it a generative quality easily qualified as divine in origin. In this early ritual confession in Romans [1:3-4], the pneuma that resurrects Christ is identified as being ‘holy’, and it is the powerful divine force that not only reboots but upgrades Christ’s body in a process of extraordinary corporeal transformation. While the portrayal of holy pneuma evokes something of the generative nature it was accorded in some philosophical circles, it also reflects a specialized outworked of what were already very ancient scriptural traditions about the bodily transformation of Yahweh’s kings and prophets, and the divine breath that had enlivened the clay figurine of Adam. For Paul himself, the transformation of Christ’s corpse was a substantive corporeal change, so that his risen body was composed entirely of pneuma: ‘Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being”, the last Adam [Christ] became enlivening pneuma’ [1 Cor. 15:45].