One phrase, four faiths: how the Holy Spirit means different things
Jews, Christians, Muslims and Baháʼís all speak of a Holy Spirit, and they mean strikingly different things by it. For one it is a quality of a single God, for another a full person of the Trinity, for a third it is often identified with the angel Gabriel. The shared name hides a deep theological divide.
In the Hebrew Bible the phrase ruach ha-kodesh refers to the spirit of God, and Jewish tradition reads it as the power of a strictly unitary deity, active in prophecy, wisdom, creation and guidance. Rabbinic thought allows it a degree of personification but treats it as one of God's attributes. Any notion of a co-equal, multi-person godhead clashes with the Shema, and Jewish thinkers class a dual or triune God as shituf, not purely monotheistic.
Most Christians, by contrast, count the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost from the Old English word for spirit, as the third person of the Trinity, fully God alongside the Father and the Son. Christian art gives it two emblems, each drawn from a gospel scene: a dove descending at Jesus's baptism in the Jordan, and tongues of fire resting on the apostles at Pentecost, fifty days after Passover. The theologian Rudolf Bultmann distinguished an 'animistic' view, a personal power that seizes someone for a task, more common in the Old Testament, from a 'dynamistic' one, an impersonal force filling a person like a fluid, more typical of the New.
The Qur'an mentions the Holy Spirit four times, as an agent of divine action or communication, and some hadith and commentary identify it with Gabriel, while the Qur'an itself condemns belief in a Trinity. Baháʼí teaching sees it as the channel through which God's wisdom reaches his messengers, taking a different form for each: a burning bush for Moses, a dove for Jesus, Gabriel for Muhammad.
Where the Christian idea came from is argued over. Some historians of religion say it cannot be explained by Jewish thought alone and point to Hellenistic mystery cults; theologian Erik Konsmo counters that the two are so unlike that only the Greek word pneuma links them.
Source: Holy Spirit
