action of inspiration was that the Holy Ghost came upon the Bible-writer like "a rushing, mighty wind."[1] To receive the gust necessary to writing a whole lost Bible, Ezra may, of course, have chained himself firmly to the trunk of a tree; but, even then, such a tempest of inspiration was enough to have blown the very teeth out of his head.
No wonder that the inspired ones were blown up and bulged out in abdomen and breast; for the "Holy Ghost," if properly translated, would be nothing more or less than the "Holy Wind." The Greek word πνευμα stands, in the New Testament, for wind, ghost, and spirit. The translators did not find it their business to make a correct translation from the "original;" but they did find it their business to gull the unlearned, and so, when they met with πνευμα, they rendered it wind in one place, ghost in another, and spirit in another—not with any regard to critical and philological nicety, but with due regard to making mysterious and imposing sentences, that should cause the wayfaring man to feel that he could not wrestle with Scriptural inscrutabilities, and that, therefore, to make all mysteries plain, it would be well to build a church and pay a parson to explain. The poor dupe, in his millions, has done so: the churches have been built, and the parsons explain; and, of course, they have always found it their interest to make the inexplicable, if possible, more inexplicable still. One of the most flagrant instances of tampering with πνευμα is to be found in the verse, "The wind bloweth where it listeth…and so is every one that is born of the Spirit."[2] The same Greek word is actually translated wind in one part of the same verse and spirit in another! And the "spirit" is no common "Spirit" either, but begins with a capital s, to make it look more mysterious and terrible to the untutored multitude who can be gulled into the building of churches and the paying for parsons. If what I say be not true, let all the learning of all their universities contradict me. Usually, when a parson finds himself in a fix, he remarks: "In the original, my dear Christian brethren, we find that our blessed Lord made
- ↑ [Erratum: Acts ii.]
