Let me share a few thoughts about the usage of pro­nouns when trans­lat­ing the Greek text to Eng­lish. If you only ever learned Eng­lish you are prob­a­bly not aware of trans­la­tional issues. Con­cern­ing nat­ural and gram­mat­i­cal gen­ders, please refer to the fol­low­ing article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

The fol­low­ing quote (http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~pxc/nlpa/nlpgloss.html) on “gen­der” high­lights the prob­lem trans­la­tors often face:

“In some lan­guages (but not Eng­lish), nouns fall into a small num­ber of classes which require changes in the arti­cles, adjec­tives, etc. which qual­ify them. In Indo-European lan­guages, these classes are tra­di­tion­ally called gen­ders and labelled accord­ing to whether nouns for males (mas­cu­line gen­der), females (fem­i­nine gen­der) or nei­ther (neuter gen­der) fall into these classes. French has two gen­ders, mas­cu­line and fem­i­nine, shown for exam­ple by the use of le or la for the; Ger­man and Mod­ern Greek have three gen­ders, hav­ing neuter as well. Note that gram­mat­i­cal gen­der is not tied to bio­log­i­cal sex, since, for exam­ple, the nouns mean­ing ‘a young girl’ are neuter in both Ger­man and Mod­ern Greek. Thus as with num­ber, gram­mat­i­cal gen­der is not the same as seman­tic gender.”

So mod­ern Eng­lish employs no gram­mat­i­cal gen­der, but old Eng­lish did. Inter­est­ingly, peo­ple still refer to cars and coun­tries as “she”.

In Hun­gar­ian, for exam­ple, there are no dif­fer­ent fem­i­nine and mas­cu­line pro­nouns for the third per­son sin­gu­lar (he/she).

Sup­pose, in our lan­guage the noun “cat” is a fem­i­nine noun. So I write about my cat that I have just bought over the week­end, and my cat is a he, for he is a male, but I need to refer to my cat as a she because the noun itself is fem­i­nine. So I have a cat that is both she and he at the same time, depend­ing on whether I refer to the gen­der of the term or the sex of the animal.

Now, let me bring you a few exam­ples from the Scrip­tures. Ignor­ing the above rules in trans­la­tions leads to dis­as­ter.
A.)

John 15:26 But when the Coun­selor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who pro­ceeds from the Father, he will bear wit­ness to me.

The Greek term for coun­selor (“parak­le­tos”) is mas­cu­line, so it attracts the mas­cu­line pro­noun, but the term for Spirit (“pneuma”) is neuter. How­ever, we notice that at the end of the verse the mas­cu­line pro­noun is used — “he will bear wit­ness” (Gk “ekeinos”). This led trans­la­tors to think that the mas­cu­line “he” points to the neuter Spirit, and such mis­takes are fol­lowed by grave the­o­log­i­cal errors. How­ever, noth­ing is fur­ther from the truth.

Let me write the above verse again with a bit of empha­sis plac­ing the explana­tory remarks in brackets:

John 15:26 But when the Coun­selor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father (the Spirit of truth, who pro­ceeds from the Father), he will bear wit­ness to me.

Writ­ing the verse this way makes it clear that the “he” points to the mas­cu­line term “coun­selor”, and the only rea­son the pro­noun is mas­cu­line is because mas­cu­line nouns attract mas­cu­line pronouns.

B.)

We have a sim­i­lar, yet some­what dif­fer­ent exam­ple in Jude:

Jude 6 Angels who didn’t keep their first domain, but deserted their own dwelling place, he has kept in ever­last­ing bonds under dark­ness for the judg­ment of the great day. 7 Even as Sodom and Gomor­rah, and the cities around them, hav­ing, in the same way as these, given them­selves over to sex­ual immoral­ity and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an exam­ple, suf­fer­ing the pun­ish­ment of eter­nal fire.

In these verses we the term “angel” is mas­cu­line, cities are fem­i­nine, thus, we would expect that “these” be also a fem­i­nine pro­noun, but it is mas­cu­line. There­fore, schol­ars con­cluded that this pro­noun had to refer to the “angels” of v. 6. Mak­ing this huge error leads to the utterly wrong con­clu­sion that those angels com­mit­ted sex­ual immoral­ity. Never mind what v. 8 says,

Jude 8 Yet in like man­ner these also in their dream­ing defile the flesh, despise author­ity, and slan­der celes­tial beings.

The fact of the mat­ter is that the Greek term “agge­los” sim­ply means “mes­sen­ger”, and thus, it may also refer to peo­ple, while “celes­tial beings” can only refer to the angels of God.

The bet­ter inter­pre­ta­tion is that the mas­cu­line pro­noun, “these”, refers to the peo­ple of Sodom (which is mas­cu­line), and thus, v. 7 has no con­nec­tion to v.6. Indeed, when we talk about cities we often mean the pop­u­lace and not the build­ings and the walls (i.e. Bal­main won against such and such). In v.7 Jude clearly talks about the pop­u­la­tion of Sodom, not the phys­i­cal city itself. How can houses sin?!

C.)

One last exam­ple is John 1.

John 1:1 In the begin­ning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 The same was in the begin­ning with God. 3 All things were made through him. With­out him was not any­thing made that has been made.

Now, the Greek term “logos” is mas­cu­line, so we expect the pres­ence of the mas­cu­line pro­noun, but cor­rectly it should be trans­lated as “it” unless the­o­log­i­cal ideas are forced into the translation.

Let us look as Tyndale’s translation:

John 1:1 In the begin­nynge was the worde and the worde was with God: and the worde was God. 2 The same was in the begin­nynge with God. 3 All thinges were made by it and with out it was made nothinge that was made. 4 In it was lyfe and the lyfe was ye lyght of men 5 and the lyght shyneth in the dar­ck­nes but the dar­ck­nes com­pre­hended it not.

Notice that Tyn­dale has the cor­rect ren­der­ing, for the term “word” in Eng­lish is neuter. There is an old Ital­ian trans­la­tion that trans­lates it with a “she”, for the Ital­ian term for “word” is fem­i­nine. Trans­lat­ing the Greek mas­cu­line pro­noun with “he” is a grave error, it is not trans­la­tion, but the­o­log­i­cal interpretation.

Sim­i­larly, within Judaism, the Shek­inah (the vis­i­ble cloud of the Pres­ence) is a fem­i­nine word, thought to be YHWH’s fem­i­nine aspect, there­fore, they often called the Spirit the “mother”. In the Gospel of the Hebrews (the Ara­maic ver­sion of Matthew) — quoted by Ori­gen — Jesus says,

“Even now did my mother the Holy Spirit take me by one of mine hairs, and car­ried me away unto the great moun­tain Thabor”