Hate to break the news to you, but if the goal of exegesis is to select the most plausible translation based on the context, you can't possibly hold to "spirit" on a purely exegetical basis. If you hold to that conclusion based on Tradition, fine, but please don't associate it with exegesis - for a couple of reasons. I'll clarify one of them here.
2 Tim 3:16 says that all Scripture is didactic. God considers it potentially useful for instruction, and He is not an obtuse teacher, nor intentionally misleading. That's generally the presupposition of the exegetical procedure. Fine. In the passages NOT in dispute here (actual souls), how is the term pneuma/ruach used? Even in the Greek OT? All parties agree that at least 100 times, it clearly denotes physical wind/breath. And yet THAT is the SAME term that God chose for souls! (Laying aside for the moment the term soul/psuche, which ALSO originates in wind/breath).
Again, is God a wise instructor? Or a foolish one? Or intentionally misleading? When the NT was written God was WELL AWARE that there would be potentially two competing translations for the term pneuma and thus the phrase "The Holy Pneuma"
(1) The Holy Spirit/Ghost as immaterial substance.
(2) The Holy Wind/Breath as material substance.
God could have solved the conflict easily if He wanted to convey immaterial substance. He could have actually chosen a traditional Greek term for Ghost, or even used the word "immaterial" or "non-material". He did none of that. It thus looks to me, if I were an immaterialist, that's He's not doing a very good job here didactically speaking. But it only gets worse. The LEAST He could have done, in this conflicted scenario, is to abstain from mentioning wind/breath in the CONTEXT of the third person. After all, we're talking about the TITLE of the third person which, as such, cannot change from verse to verse. Therefore if we can find even ONE PASSAGE that clearly mentions wind/breath in the CONTEXT of the Third Person, the scales are tipped decisively in favor of translation #2. (Again, unless you think that God is an inane instructor).
In point of fact there are SEVERAL passages that put wind/breath in the context of the Third Person. Here's an example I gave at post 12:
"The Red Sea did not part instantly. Rather a wind slowly pushed the waters apart over the course of an entire evening. According to Moses, that wind was a blast of Breath from God's nostrils (Ex 15). This is God physically pushing a pencil - by direct agency. The word that Moses used for Breath in that passage is the SAME WORD blatantly mistranslated "The Holy Spirit" for 2,000 years."
My favorite example is John 20:22:
"Jesus
breathed on His disciples, and said, 'Receive ye The Holy [
Breath]" (Jn 20:22).
Jesus was expelling physical wind/breath from His nostrils. In my understanding, there was a scholarly consensus, for at least 1,000 years in the church, that the above rendering was the most literal translation of the Greek. Even some modern scholars admit this to be the most literal rendering.
Another great example is Pentecost:
"They heard the sound of a mighty rushing
wind...They were all filled with the Holy [
Wind]" (Acts 2).
Again, the CONTEXT is exegetically decisive. Even a relatively uneducated Greek child, in those days, would have rendered the text as I just did, based on the context.
ONLY a Platonist could possibly read "magical immaterial substance" into these passages.