That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.
//I’ve written before about the feminine aspects and qualities of God throughout scripture, and of the correspondence between Wisdom (Greek: Sophia, a feminine name) and the Holy Spirit. But C. D. Baker points out something interesting in his wonderful book, Becoming the Son:
Today’s words were written in Greek. The Greek word for the Spirit is Pneuma, a genderless word. Today’s verse quotes the Gospel of John, and in that gospel, Jesus is closely associated with the Spirit, so in my own book about this gospel, I refer to the Spirit in the same gender as Jesus. A male.
Baker points out the error in this thinking, by referring to the Aramaic word for the Spirit that Jesus himself would have used: Rauch, the native Aramaic word, is grammatically feminine. Jesus would have naturally spoken of the Spirit as a she … we are born of her.
