Ghosts in the New Testament? – Part 1
In this series we’ll be exploring the whole question of whether there are ghosts in the Bible, particularly the New Testament (though we’re going to run a series on the Old Testament too at a later date). We shall investigate the words used in the texts of the Bible and non-biblical material that was recorded by those cultures on the subject. As the Bible was written over a period of about 1600 years, by 40 authors, no one context will be sufficient to get a decent understanding of the subject.
Words Have Meaning
Christians have used the term ‘Holy Ghost’ to describe the non-observable third person of the Trinity, which in the Latin was ‘Spiritus Sanctus’, and many today use ‘Holy Spirit’ to describe the same being. The word ‘ghost’ itself couldn’t be found in the Hebrew or Greek source manuscripts for the Bible as its etymology (word origin) comes from the much later Proto-West Germanic, gaistaz, which in turn influenced the Old Saxon, gest, Old Frisian, jest, Middle Dutch, gheest, and German, geist (which influenced Martin Luther to coin the term ‘poltergeist’, or ‘noisy spirit’). The Old English, gast, became the modern ‘ghost’. All these words encompassed a range of meanings from breath, angels, demons, spirits – both good and bad, and human.
The understanding of the word ghost as a human spirit that somehow wanders amongst haunting the living, either seen or unseen, comes around the end of the 14th century, and links back to the contextual understanding of certain words used to describe the departed in the context of that particular Bible verse.
Therefore, the word ‘ghost’ and its meaning is relatively modern, and although there are Christians who would say that ‘ghost’ means an evil spirit, we shall avoid that a priori interpretation of the word, sticking with the one used in common parlance and defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as: ‘[an] apparition of a dead person which is believed to appear or become manifest to the living, typically as a nebulous image.’
The Word Ghost in Scripture
Whilst there is no mention of the word ‘ghost’ in translations of the Old Testament, there are a couple of incidents recorded in a few New Testament passages, where the word ‘ghost’ has been used by modern translators. It is here that we shall begin our exploration, by examining the cultural understanding of what ghosts were believed to be. This will have informed the thinking of the disciples and the writers of the Gospels, as well as Jesus’ usage of the word translated as ‘ghost’ to them.
It will be shown that rather than a taboo subject for Christians to engage with, or one simply dismissed as purely demonic (Unger, 1994:148), ghosts in Scripture offer us insight into contextual beliefs in the afterlife, which may help us better gain an understanding of it from a Biblical perspective.
Seeing as this series was written in Holy Week, we shall also explore the ways in which Jesus’ resurrection both confirmed and broke the cultural conventions of how the dead were understood to operate in the afterlife.
‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’
Hamlet Act 1, Scene 5, 159-169.
Next Time – we explore the strange story of Jesus walking on the water and see that it was written in the style of a ghost story, but one which challenged the original readers expectations of ghosts.
