Ghost

Ghost in biblical usage is an archaic English translation of the Hebrew nephesh (soul, life, breath) and Greek pneuma (spirit, breath) in specific contexts, not the modern concept of a disembodied spirit of the dead. In the King James Version, Holy Ghost is the standard rendering of pneuma hagion (Holy Spirit) — a translation that reflects seventeenth-century English usage where ghost and spirit were interchangeable for the breath or animating principle of a living being.

In its more specific OT senses, ghost refers to the departing life-breath at death: he gave up the ghost is the KJV rendering of the idiom for dying (Job 11:20; Jeremiah 15:9; Matthew 27:50). The expression yielded up the ghost used for Jesus's death on the cross (Matthew 27:50) translates the Greek aphēken to pneuma — he released the spirit. Scripture does not teach that the dead wander as disembodied ghosts; the fear that the disciples mistake Jesus for a ghost (Luke 24:37) is presented as a misunderstanding that his physical resurrection corrects, not as a validation of ghost theology.