God’s Spirit
God’s Spirit
Given that Jesus’ followers preserved John’s teaching about the eschatological outpouring of the Spirit; that they attributed their own pervasively charismatic activity to the eschatological experience of the Spirit; and that our earliest sources for Jesus include some attribution of his own activity to the Spirit (Mk 3:29-30; cf. Matt 12:28//Lk 11:20), it is likely that Jesus did promise his disciples the Spirit at some point.27 This would follow his continuity with John’s message, since Q portrays John announcing his successor baptizing in the Holy Spirit (Matt 3:11//Lk 3:16).
The promise of the Spirit appears, albeit in quite different ways, in Mk 13:11; Lk 24:49 (with Acts 1:4-8); and Jn 14:17, 26; 15:26; 16:13; 20:22. Both John and Luke, probably independently, place the promise both before and after the resurrection. In view of Luke (Acts 1:4-8) and John (Jn 20:21-22), and perhaps implicitly in the second-century addition to Mk 16 (Mk 16:17-18), it is reasonable to suppose that Jesus’ postresurrection teaching about the disciples’ mission included empowerment by the Spirit.
Thus some key elements of teaching attributed to the risen Jesus in the Gospels plausibly do derive from early traditions about what Jesus’ disciples believed that he taught them after the resurrection.