@ 2023-05-20: THE HOLY SPIRIT AS THE *PARAKLETOS

In response to a teacher and friend:

You were speaking of the Holy Spirit as the Comforter or Helper. No, the antecedent of "he" in the quotes below is not God the Father, save where "He" is capitalized. It is the Holy Spirit as the Helper (Advocate is better, even if not perfect either), which grammatically is masculine. This is a legitimate translation, for the following reasons.

Jesus used a figure of speech, according to a common Jewish idiom. He alternated between the figurative Advocate and the literal Spirit, and his grammar and syntax reflect this. Transcending this point: whether in Greek or in Aramaic (or in Hebrew for that matter), the Spirit (as the "other Advocate", just as Jesus was and remains our "Advocate") acts in a "personal" way. That does not make it a third Person of a Triune God. The (masculine) "Comforter" or "Advocate" is a figure of speech, plainly and simply. So is the "personal" activity of the (neuter) Spirit.

Here is the exact sense of the Greek, as given in a slightly revised text from Ernest Martin's "A Faithful Version". The neuter is left unremarked. The masculine is marked with a star (☆):

AFV-R
Joh 14:16 And I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter☆ [Greek paraklētos* (παράκλητος) or loan word in Hebrew & Aramaic peraqliyt* (פרקליט) = Hebrew meliyts* (מֵלִיץ), intercessor], that he☆ may be with you throughout the age:
Joh 14:17  Even the Spirit of the truth, which the world cannot receive because it perceives it not, nor knows it; but you know it, because it dwells with you, and it shall be within you.

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Joh 14:26 But when the Comforter☆ comes, even the Holy Spirit, which the Father will send in My name, 'that one'☆ shall teach you all things, and shall bring to your remembrance everything that I have told you.

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Joh 15:26 But when the Comforter☆ has come, whom☆ I will send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of the truth, which proceeds from the Father, 'that one'☆ shall bear witness of Me.

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Joh 16:7 But I am telling you the truth. It is profitable for you that I go away because if I do not go away, the Comforter☆ will not come to you. However, if I go, I will send him☆ to you.
Joh 16:8  And having come, 'that one'☆ will convict the world concerning sin, and righteousness, and judgment...

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Joh 16:25 These things I have spoken to you in allegories [parables, figures of speech: the plural of paroimia* (παροιμία), i.e. 'en paraoimiais'* (εν παροιμιαις), or in Hebrew, bimshalim* (בִּמְשָׁלִים)]; but the time is coming when I will no longer speak to you in allegories, but I will plainly disclose to you the things of the Father.

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The Jews used paraklētos* (as borrowed into Hebrew and Aramaic) in the same figurative way. It was always masculine in agreement. (The original, literal "advocate" was a representative, mediator, or intercessor for a Jew in Greco-Roman jurisprudence.) A gift to a magistrate or a sacrifice to God was described by the rabbis as a representative of or an advocate for the giver, as if it were a masculine person - because figuratively, it acted like one. So did repentance and good deeds, for example. Yet no one ever imagined that the figurative paraklētos* was a masculine person.

In like matter, the Holy Spirit (neuter in Greek, almost always feminine in Biblical Hebrew, and feminine in pre-Trinitarian Aramaic) acts like a masculine person, because it is the Mind or Rational Faculty of God and Christ (1Co 2). That does not mean it is a masculine Divine Person. But it *is an *extension of the Divine Being or Person(s), and intercedes for us with God the Father.

I have yet to see either a Protestant commentary or a Greek lexicon that admits all this. Only in a famous old Talmudic dictionary does one find the critical "factoid" concerning the Jewish usage (Jastrow, p. 1241).

https://www.tyndalearchive.com/TABS/Jastrow/

I gave a sermonette years ago on this topic in Houston.

Cordially in Christ,
John Wheeler