{"id":7705,"date":"2026-05-22T03:12:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T03:12:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=7705"},"modified":"2026-10-02T01:31:15","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T01:31:15","slug":"why-ghost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/?p=7705","title":{"rendered":"WHY GHOST?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first time I gave any thought whatsoever to the Holy Spirit wasn&#8217;t until a college Bible study. Only then did I realize that my home church never even mentioned the Spirit outside of the last line of the Doxology we sang every Sunday morning following the passing of the offering plates: &#8220;praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost&#8221;.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If I had given any thought to the matter as a child, it was only how &#8220;ghost&#8221; was a strange word to associate with God&#8217;s Spirit!<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If Google can be trusted, the Tyndale Bible was the first to translate the Greek\u00a0<i>pneuma hagion<\/i> as &#8220;Holy Ghost&#8221;. That was in 1526 and in that day the Old English <i>gast<\/i>, meaning <i>spirit <\/i>or <i>soul<\/i>, had morphed into <i>ghost<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So\u00a0<i>ghost <\/i>originally had a much broader meaning, without any of today&#8217;s baggage of being the spooky, ethereal, and shadowy soul of a dead human, out only to haunt the living.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">A truly unfortunate evolution of an important word!<\/p>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Unfortunately, even though the word <i>ghost <\/i>changed drastically over the centuries, the descriptor of &#8220;Holy Ghost&#8221; for the Third Person of the Trinity continues to hang about the Church, thanks to old hymns and the King James Bible, which largely copied Tyndale&#8217;s practice in this case.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The first time I gave any thought whatsoever to the Holy Spirit wasn&#8217;t until a college Bible study. Only then did I realize that my home church never even mentioned the Spirit outside of the last line of the Doxology we sang every Sunday morning following the passing of the offering plates: &#8220;praise Father, Son, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7705","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7705","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7705"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7705\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7706,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7705\/revisions\/7706"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7705"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7705"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7705"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}