Greek Roots · letter 16 of 24

Pi

The mouth — and the letter of breath, wind and Spirit.

How the shape crossed the sea

Phoenician · c. 1000–800 BC

Phoenician pe — a mouth.

Archaic Greek · c. 750–500 BC

A lintel on two legs, the right one short — it grew level much later.

The classical capital · the New Testament's own letters

Every New Testament manuscript was written in capitals like this one — no lower case, and no spaces between the words.

The Phoenician drawing is the same one the Hebrew hall uses for that letter — at this date the two scripts were one alphabet in two neighbouring hands. The archaic Greek form is simplified from published hand-copies of the early inscriptions, not a facsimile of any single stone: early Greek scribes varied wildly, and wrote right to left as readily as left to right.

Sounds like

A clean p, with no puff of breath after it — that is phi's job.

Written p in scholarly books.

Its number

it is letter 16 — the gap is the lost letters, which kept their numbers

Its name means

mouth (from pe)

in Phoenician, not in Greek

Borrowed from

Phoenician pe

Well established

Pneuma is one of the great untranslatable words. It means breath, it means wind, and it means spirit — all three at once, exactly as the Hebrew ruach does. Greek did not invent the overlap for the Bible's benefit; it simply happened to have the same range.

Which means Jesus can make a pun in John 3 that no English Bible can keep. “The wind blows where it wills… so is everyone born of the Spirit.” Wind and Spirit are the same word, said twice.

Where the New Testament uses this letter

The wind, the breath and the Spirit

In John 3:8 the word appears twice in one sentence, meaning “wind” the first time and “Spirit” the second. Translators must pick, and the sentence loses its hinge either way. It is the clearest case in the New Testament of an English Bible being unable to say what the Greek said.

The same doubling runs back through the Old Testament: the ruach hovering over the waters in Genesis 1:2 and the breath breathed into Adam are the same word too.

Faith is a word about trust, not certainty

Pistis in ordinary Greek covers trust, faithfulness, and the trustworthiness that earns trust — a bank could be described with it. The New Testament uses it 242 times, and the noun and the verb are the same root: to have faith is to trust.

The coming, and what the word meant to a Greek city

Parousia is not a religious word. It is the term for a royal or imperial visit — the arrival of the king, with the city turned out to meet him on the road. Cities struck coins for a parousia. That is the picture behind the New Testament's word for Christ's return.

Words that begin here

πνεῦμα

pneuma — breath, wind, spirit

378 occurrences, and three English words hiding in one Greek one.

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πίστις

pistis — faith, trust, faithfulness

Trust that can be depended on, in both directions.

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παρουσία

parousia — arrival, presence

A state visit by a king — the word the New Testament chose for the second coming.

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πατήρ

patēr — father

410 occurrences. Jesus' habitual name for God, and the reason “Abba” is in your Bible.

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