“In the beginning”; both the creation story in Genesis and the prologue of John’s Gospel commence with these words. At the outset of his book, John magnificently retells creation by chronicling how all things were made through the Word of God. This craftsmanship of his, however, does not cease after a short time, but reaches far further than we easily perceive. John imitates creation, not only in his opening meditation, but at the very termination of his Gospel. There, he looks to creation's zenith and reports a return of creation’s grandest work: when God vivifies man.
Genesis 2 reports with thorough detail how man received life from God. Genesis 2:7 reads, “then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” In the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament of the first-century Christian church, the verb “breathed” is emphusaō. John echoes this narrative and diction from Genesis 2:7 at the end of his Gospel when the resurrected Jesus stands amidst His gathered disciples. According to John’s account, Jesus “breathed on them and said to them, ‘receive the Holy Spirit’” (John 20:22). The word for “breathed,” emphusaō, is the same as in Genesis 2:7. The repetition of a word so salient to both accounts is the first of many threads which bind these two Scriptures together. When all these threads are examined, Jesus’ Spirit-bearing breath points to a second coming of God’s inspiration of Adam.
The first order of scrutiny is discerning why John chose to write emphusaō. Throughout Greek literature, from Homer until the first century AD, empneō had been a more common word for “breathe” than emphusaō.1 John 20:22 holds the only appearance of emphusaō in the entire New Testament. In fact, the New Testament seldom contains any verb for “breathe,” so there are few other verses to inform our reading of John 20:22. Best is Acts 9:1, which reads, “now Saul, still breathing [empneō] threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest.” Perhaps John chose emphusaō to avoid the figurative sense that empneō clearly carries in this verse. Whether for this reason or another, given the prevalence of empneō in Greek literature from the time of Homer, John must have consciously rejected empneō and favored emphusaō. Further evidence suggests John chose emphusaō, not on a whim to create its singular appearance in the New Testament, but in an allusion which reaches for Genesis.
The connection between John 20:22 and Genesis 2:7 is illuminated by thematic and narrative patterns that are common to the two passages. After God breathed life into man in Genesis, He created the Garden of Eden. In the Garden, placed at the “middle” (Greek: mesos), stood the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:9). John mimics the landscape of the trees in Eden when he emphasizes Jesus’ central position among the disciples: “Jesus came and stood in their midst [mesos]” (John 20:19). Genesis also records, “the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15). This is an astonishing parallel to Jesus’ words to His disciples: “‘as the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you’” (John 20:21). Just as God breathed into Adam before sending him to work the garden, so too does Jesus breath upon His disciples before sending them into the world. Each breath inaugurates a mission for man to carry out the will of God.
Scripture teaches that the Spirit gives life (John 6:63, Romans 8:1-17). In this regard, Scripture supports a theoretical connection between Adam’s life and life from the Holy Spirit. But Paul—although he probably wrote to the church in Corinth before John wrote his Gospel—makes the connection explicit. In 1 Corinthians 15:45, Paul writes, “so also it is written, ‘the first man, Adam, became a living soul.’ The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.” Paul quotes Genesis 2:7 from the Septuagint: “‘The first man, Adam, became a living soul.’”2 The “last Adam” that he refers to is Jesus. Paul likens Adam’s reception of life to Jesus’ deliverance of the “life-giving” Holy Spirit, identifying much the same parallel as John and testifying that, since this parallel was known to the first Christians, John probably is trying to create it.
It is worth pausing to address one obvious complication in 1 Corinthians 15:45. How do we know that Paul is referring to the Holy Spirit? The Greek word for “Spirit” in this verse is pneuma, whose range of meaning stretches from wind to breath to soul to spirit. This word in the New Testament often names the Holy Spirit, but so too could it signify “spirit” more vaguely.
Although the early church fathers do not leave us any guiding interpretation of this verse,3 one window into the mind of the early church still directs us. When scribes copying Biblical manuscripts encountered certain names such as God, Jesus, or Spirit, they would write them in a shorthand known as a nomen sacrum, or “sacred name.” So, when scribes believed that pneuma, which they would normally write as ΠΝΕΥΜΑ, referred to the Holy Spirit, they would abbreviate the word as ΠΝΑ with a dash over the top.
This practice is present in our earliest New Testament manuscripts. In many of these, scribes have opted to write pneuma in 1 Corinthians 15:45 using the nomen sacrum, indicating the belief that this verse does refer to the Holy Spirit. The nomina sacra in two of the earliest and most authoritative New Testament manuscripts are pictured at the top of this article for your reference. Based on these scribal interpretations, Paul does indeed draw the same parallel as John between Adam’s life and life from the Holy Spirit, demonstrating the presence of this connection in the first century Christian zeitgeist.
The argument that John is deliberately paralleling Genesis 2 is not flawless. The repeated Greek diction may be an accident. The twofold breaths may be a coincidence, as may be the corresponding missions to go into the world doing God’s work. The scribes who copied 1 Corinthians 15:45 may have been wrong in their interpretations. And nowhere in the works of the church’s early fathers have I found a guiding comment on this matter. But a great body of linguistic, thematic, and narrative evidence argues that these verses run parallel. It is probable that, in the same way God gifted Adam life, so too do we receive the gift of life from the Holy Spirit. This analysis births new meaning to the life of the Spirit, uniting our work of carrying out God’s will to Adam’s work of cultivating Eden. Most importantly, it reveals that the difference between the Holy Spirit and His absence in us is the difference between Adam and the dust on the ground.
This claim about word popularity is sourced from the LSJ (Liddell-Scott-Jones) Lexicon of the ancient Greek language. It is also important to remember that words are always coming and going with time and literary genre.
Paul does insert two extra words, “first” and “Adam,” into the quotation to add clarity.
At least, I could not find any in my research.