Matthew Thiessen, A Jewish Paul: The Messiah’s Herald to the Gentiles (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2023), 107-108.
Paul was neither a Stoic nor a highly trained philosopher. But the basic elements of Platonic and Stoic thinking were the conceptual air that most people in the Greco-Roman world breathed. One would surely be wrong to think that all people today know what quarks and hadrons are, but many of us have a basic understanding of what gravity is or what atoms, protons, and neutrons are. So too, it is hard to believe that someone like Paul would not have known how the term pneuma was being used more broadly in his day. And, if we can trust Acts on this point, Paul came from the city of Tarsus, a known hotbed of Stoic philosophy. This was his world, even if it is not ours.
Therefore, when Paul spoke of the pneuma, he was doing so under the influence of not only the Greek translations of Jewish scriptures but also of the intellectual context of his own day, where pneuma was thought to be the best material in the cosmos. In other words, unless he unmistakably signaled that he meant something quite different, his readers would inevitably have heard pneuma as those around them were commonly using it: to refer to a type of matter that was eternal and divine. While we cannot know what was in Paul’s mind, I would suggest that unless he was a very poor communicator, he would have known he needed to clarify what he meant by pneuma if he meant something dramatically different from what most others around him would have meant by the term. Otherwise he would have opened himself up to inevitable misunderstandings.
The Amateur Exegete 