Was the Holy Spirit given only after Jesus was glorified, when people were filled with the Spirit long before?

John does not say that the Holy Spirit had never been at work. He explains a particular promise that Jesus had just made to “they that believe on him”: rivers of living water flowing from every believer (John 7:38–39). Throughout the Old Testament the Spirit spoke through the prophets, as through David (Mark 12:36; Acts 1:16), and came upon chosen people for a task, like Bezalel the craftsman (Exodus 31:3) or the judges. John the Baptist, the last of the prophets, and Simeon, who was given a word from God about the Christ (Luke 2:26), belong to that pattern. Luke’s phrase, “the Holy Ghost was upon him”, is the Old Testament way of speaking.

The Old Testament itself looked forward to something more. Moses wished that all the Lord’s people were prophets, with his Spirit upon them (Numbers 11:29), and Joel foretold that God would “pour out my spirit upon all flesh” (Joel 2:28). Jesus told the disciples that the Spirit “dwelleth with you, and shall be in you” (John 14:17), and that he would not come to them unless Jesus went away (John 16:7). At Pentecost Peter explains the event just as John 7:39 does: Jesus, “being by the right hand of God exalted”, had received the promised Spirit and poured him out (Acts 2:33). So the Spirit was at work long before Jesus was glorified, but the promised gift to all who believe came afterwards.

The Greek of John 7:39 makes the point plainer still. The word ‘given’ is missing from nearly all manuscripts except Codex Vaticanus, and some of the oldest lack ‘Holy’ as well, so that John may have written simply ‘the Spirit was not yet’. Translators supply ‘given’ to bring out the sense, as Ellicott and the Cambridge Bible note. John has already told how the Baptist saw the Spirit come down and remain on Jesus (John 1:32), so he does not mean that the Spirit did not exist. He means that the age of the Spirit had not yet begun. When the risen Jesus breathed on the disciples (John 20:22), he had already been glorified in John’s sense, through his death and resurrection (John 12:23–24); some read that act as a first, real gift of the Spirit and others as a pledge of the fuller gift at Pentecost (see the answer on John 20:22 and Pentecost).

The same Spirit, a fuller measure

Barnes and others put it in terms of measure: believers before Christ received the Spirit’s work in some degree, but not the full and lasting outpouring that came after the ascension. On this view the difference is one of fullness and reach, to Jews and Gentiles alike, rather than of kind.

Christian scholars differ on how far believers before Pentecost were indwelt by the Spirit. Some hold that the faithful of every age were renewed and kept by the Spirit, and that what was new at Pentecost was the fullness and breadth of the gift. Others hold that the Spirit’s lasting presence within every believer began only at Pentecost. Both readings take John 7:39 to describe a new stage in the Spirit’s work, not his first appearance.