Note 7 — Chapter V · THE ASCENSION.

If this were the only passage relating to the impartation of the Spirit, every one would believe that the disciples had it communicated to them by Jesus when he was personally present among them, and not first after his exaltation to heaven. But in accordance with the harmonizing interest, it has been concluded, first by Theodore of Mopsuestia, and recently by Tholuck,7 that the word λάβετε, receive, in John, must be taken in the sense of λήψεσθε, ye shall receive, because according to Luke the Holy Spirit was not imparted to the disciples until later, at Pentecost. But as if he wished to preclude such a wresting of his words, the Jesus of John adds to them the symbolical action of breathing on the disciples, which unmistakably represents the receiving of the Holy Spirit as a present fact.8 It is true that expositors have found out a way of eluding even this act of breathing, by attributing to it the following signification: as certainly as Jesus now breathes upon them, so certainly will they at a future time receive the Holy Ghost.9 But the act of breathing upon a person is as decided a symbol of a present impartation as the laying on of hands, and as those on whom the apostles laid their hands were immediately filled with the Spirit (Acts viii. 17, xix. 6), so, according to the above narrative, the author of the fourth gospel must have thought that the Apostles on that occasion received the Spirit from Jesus. In order to avoid the necessity of denying, in opposition to the clear meaning of John, that an impartation of the Spirit actually took place immediately after the resurrection, or of coming into contradiction with Luke, who assigns the outpouring of the Spirit to a later period, expositors now ordinarily suppose that the Spirit was granted to the Apostles both at the earlier and the later period, the impartation at Pentecost being only an increasing and perfecting of the former.10 Or more correctly, since Matthew x. 20 speaks of the Spirit of the Father as already sustaining the disciples in their first mission: it is supposed that they were first endowed with some extraordinary power before that mission, in the lifetime of Jesus; that on the occasion in question, shortly after his resurrection, he heightened this power; but that all the fulness of the Spirit was not poured out upon them until Pentecost.11 What constitutes the distinction between these steps, and especially in what the increase of the gifts of the Spirit consisted in the present instance, is, however, as Michaelis has already remarked, not easy to discern. If in the first instance the apostles were endowed with the power of working miracles (Matt. x. 1, 8) together with the gift of speaking freely (par)r(êsi/a) before tribunals (v. 20), it could only be a more correct insight into the spirituality of his kingdom that Jesus communicated to them by breathing on them; but of this they were still destitute immediately before the ascension, when, according to Acts i. 6, they asked whether, with the impartation of the Spirit, within the next few days, would be associated the restoration of the kingdom to Israel. If however it be supposed that each successive impartation of the Spirit conferred no new powers on the disciples, but was merely an addition in measure to that which was already present in all its diversified powers:12 it must still be held surprising that no Evangelist mentions, together with an earlier impartation, a later amplification; but instead of this, besides an incidental mention of the Spirit as enabling the disciples to defend themselves before tribunals, in Luke (xii. 12),—which, since it is not here, as in Matthew, connected with a mission, may be regarded merely as a reference to the time after the later outpouring of the Spirit,—each of the Evangelists mentions only one impartation, and represents this as the first and last. This is, indeed, a clear proof that, to place in juxtaposition three impartations and to regard them as so many different degrees, is only an effort to harmonize the gospels by introducing into them what is foreign to the text.