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How Christianity Re-Defined Judaism’s “Holy Spirit”
Even if you’re Christian, what the early church believed might well surprise you.
Note: This is a long read, so key concepts have been bolded to make it easier to navigate.
When we’re talking about Biblical scripture, we’re talking about writings spanning a millennium in their composition, ending some two millennia before our own time. So to understand what “holy spirit” means in those scrolls, we have to look at what it meant to the cultures who produced them.
The Holy Spirit in Hebrew Scripture
Among the Ancient Hebrews, there are two broad traditions using the term “holy spirit” — which for convenience we’ll call priestly and rabbinic Judaism here, although that’s not scholastically accurate. Modern Christians might make a very rough comparison to the Catholic Church and Baptists — one with a rigid authority (even state authority) and explicit dogma and longer pedigree, and the other a broad popular confederation of aligned but constantly debating subfactions.
Priestly testimonies
“Holy spirit” first appears in Hebrew priestly writings from Babylon, during the forced exile of Jewish leadership from Judea in the 6th century BCE. One of the…
