The word that we call the “definite article” in Greek is a slippery fellow. Many of its uses in English overlap with that of Greek, and so it is easy to tell first year Greek students to translate it is “the” when ho is present, and to not include it when ho is absent.
But even in first year Greek we quickly start to see the problems of this approach. Greek uses ho when we never would, such as before proper names. So we tell our students to ignore ho in this case.
But then it is "missing" when English requires it, such as in prepositional phrases, so we tell students they can add in &qout;the" when English requires it, such as in a preposition-noun construction where the noun is anarthrous (i.e., not preceded by ho). "born of … spirit" in John 3:5 becomes "born of … the Spirit".
And then as we get further into the language we start seeing more subtleties. The fact of the matter is that Greek nouns carry a degree of definiteness beyond that of English nouns, and the Greek article is not required to make them definite. This is why we can add "the" into a translation when English requires it to carry over the sense of the Greek. But the more we do this, the further we go into interpretation, and the further we go into interpretation the greater the danger of subjectivity in the translation process.
