Lesson plan: The Holy Ghost and the Intercessory Prayer

11 July 1999
Mike Tueller

Today's reading was just two short chapters, both of them really very confusing.

The setting for these chapters is immediately before Jesus goes to be betrayed. He gives a farewell sermon which occupies all of chapters 14-17. We might imagine that these chapters would contain some of Jesus's most important teaching. They focus on love, the Holy Ghost, the mediation of Jesus, and something else--whatever chapter 17 is about.

Today we will look at two of these subjects, the Holy Ghost and chapter 17, which is usually known as the intercessory prayer.

1. The Holy Ghost.

I'd like to start off with the Holy Ghost. The structure of the class today is going to be very simple, but a little unusual. This first part is going to require a lot of class participation, and I hope that participation will be spiritual enough in nature that we will have an appropriate setting for the second part.

For the first part of the class, we'll go through some selected passages in John and try to understand the nature of the Holy Ghost. While we're doing that, I would like you to think about an experience you've had with the Holy Ghost--one that you would be willing to share with the class. I think that we'll find that the Holy Ghost is a lot harder to understand by description than by example, so hopefully the sharing of two or three spiritual experiences will help us understand what it is all about.

So, while you are thinking of a spiritual experience, let's read some sample scriptures:

Read John 14:26; 15:26; 16:13-14.

2. Gnosticism.

I hope we can continue in the same spirit with this part of the lesson.

To start off, I should tell you that scholars today describe a debate that they see as having occurred in early Christianity. In the context of the first and early second centuries, however, it would be better to call it a spectrum of belief rather than a debate, because we don't actually that much arguing about it: we just see differing points of view which go between two poles. (Eventually, positions solidify, and a position embracing the middle position and one of the poles declares the other pole to be heretical; then the debate begins in earnest.)

The two poles of belief have to do with what exactly about Jesus has saving power. One pole believes that it access to the atonement--the death and resurrection of Jesus--that saves. The other pole believes that it is knowledge of, and adherence to, Jesus's teachings that saves. To put it in a nutshell, which is more important: Jesus's death, or what He said during His life?

Early Christianity is often easier to think about when you realize that different authors take different positions in this spectrum. Paul, for instance, is almost entirely on the side of Jesus's atonement being the key--he greatly de-emphasizes Jesus's teachings, almost never mentioning them. Matthew, Mark, and Luke represent a middle position, trying to show that both the teachings and the atonement are important.

Now, if Paul represents one extreme, and the synoptic gospels the middle ground, who represents the other extreme? It's not John--not quite (admittedly, John and the Epistles of John get closer than anything else in the New Testament). Rather, scholars identify a group of Christians known as "gnostics." What did gnostics believe? In short, they believed that secret knowledge given to them by Christ would grant them salvation. However, there's much more. They also believed that the creator of this world was an evil being who had rebelled from God. Another being, named Wisdom, had also rebelled and been cast out; she had been broken into many pieces, which remained on the earth. Some of these pieces were part of people. Those people who possessed a piece of Wisdom were able to eventually ascend to God, if they had learned the right knowledge. There's even more--for instance, they believed that Jesus had never really taken a body: He had either pretended to do so, or He was a spirit that had temporarily taken possession of another body, from the period from the baptism until just before death.

Gnosticism, I should warn you, is, in many respects, pretty weird. And, what's more, a lot of it is clearly not Christian in origin. Rather, it comes from other religions--called "mystery religions"--that had secret ceremonies and special knowledge, along with a lot of Greek philosophy. However, surely there is some Christian kernel in the gnostic teachings which may have been truth, mixed in with all this falsehood. If there is, it was lost in the second century A.D., when the groups that later became orthodox Christianity threw the baby out with the bathwater.

3. Gnosticism and Mormonism.

Now, why does all this matter? Let me give you two quick quotes about modern Mormonism to try to demonstrate:

The God of Joseph Smith is a daring revival of the God of some Kabbalists and Gnostics, prophetic sages who, like Smith himself, asserted that they had returned to the true religion of Yahweh or Jehovah. (Harold Bloom, The American Religion, p. 99)

These ordinances of the priesthood are administered, and their purpose taught, in what might be termed "closed revelation," that is, they are not revealed to the unprepared world in the ordinary way. Those who enter the temple "hungering and thirsting," as it were, have revealed to them knowledge and understanding of their relationship to God, and they learn what they need to do to gain the greatest gift of God--eternal life and exaltation with their loved ones. Thus, one might in reverence refer to the temple as the "university of the Lord." (Elder Elray L. Christiansen, General conference talk, 1 April 1968)

The first quote shows you that, to a non-LDS intellectual who carefully investigates the doctrinal (as opposed to historical or social) content of the church, we can be equated with gnostics. The second shows you that this equation may very well be right--ancient gnostics, too, believed that knowledge gained in sacred ceremonies, which they could not reveal to anyone, would be the key to their future salvation.

We should be both alarmed and intrigued by this comparison. We should be alarmed because, as I said, the ancient gnostics that we know about clearly didn't have the true gospel. But we should be intrigued because there seems to be a possibility that the Restoration has found the truth in those teachings. Let's see how close the parallels really are.

4. The intercessory prayer.

Now let's look at John 17 again. Does this have anything to do with gnostic ideas? Scholars believe it does, but let's see for ourselves. Let's start in chapter 16.

Read John 16:25, 29.

The word translated "proverb" here is really more like "likeness," or in other words, one thing symbolizing another. Jesus claims that He will--and then begins to--reveal Himself and the Father plainly. The disciples are now clearly getting special knowledge. Is this knowledge important? The next scripture tells us:

Read John 17:3.

This scripture is about as gnostic (in concept) as it is possible to get: Jesus plainly says that eternal life consists in knowledge.

Read John 17:6-8.

In these verses Jesus says that He has passed on to the disciples a name which God gave to Him, and that they have kept all the words that He gave them. One way to read these verses is that Jesus has transmitted some special name to them, that they are supposed to preserve, and that they have done so.

The more I read this chapter, the more I am convinced that it is not much like a prayer at all. It seems more like an introduction. Jesus speaks to the Father on familiar terms, and reports to Him what He has done with these disciples. After telling the Father that He has transmitted important knowledge to these disciples, He then, essentially, introduces the disciples to the Father.

Read John 17:13-17.

As we read these verses, we can see Jesus about to pass through the veil: He says that He is coming to the Father, and has left the world. The disciples have also done this; it seems, from verse 14, that from receiving the word which the Father gave to Jesus, they, too, have left the world. However, they are not departing to go live with the Father just yet, but are sanctified.

5. What next?--gnostic salvation.

What did Jesus do after His life? How exactly did He ascend to heaven? The gnostics had an answer to this, but we perceive it quite dimly through the existing gnostic texts, which, as I said, clearly have a great deal of falsehood mingled with truth.

Let me introduce you to one of these texts, the Pistis Sophia. It is a Coptic document that first surfaced in London in the late 18th century, when it ended up in the British Museum. In the 1850s it began to attract a lot of interest, and translations began to be made of it, first into Latin, then into French and eventually English by the 1880s. It has become fairly famous in the church from its description of the ancient Christian practice of prayer circles. Another part of the document (the text is very diffuse, but a lot of the elements I will talk about can be seen in chapters 10 and 29), tells how Jesus received two garments. Of the second one the text says,

And in the second garment is the whole glory of the name of all the mysteries and all the emanations which are in the ranks of the two spaces of the First Mystery. And in this garment which we have now sent thee is the glory of the name of the mystery of the informer, which is the first ordinance, and the mystery of the five incisions,...

I have quoted very selectively here; the text descends rapidly into gibberish after this point. However, what is interesting is that again we see a name, but now it is associated with some special article of clothing--or two of them. This name and the article of clothing are important, because, as the text goes on, Jesus passes through a series of veils, at each of which the beings posted there (referred to as Aeons--in this text, as throughout the gnosticism that has survived, they are evil beings, allied with Sophia, the evil being who was expelled from heaven) see the glory of this article of clothing and the name written on it and are compelled to let Jesus pass.

In other gnostic texts, it seems that it is not just Jesus, but also His followers who will go into heaven in this manner. The Second Treatise of the Great Seth says that "they will pass by every gate without fear and be perfected in the third glory." A modern commentator (Bart Ehrman, p. 167--see below) described what was necessary to pass through these gates as "passwords."

It is interesting to contemplate the possibility that this teaching may have originated with Jesus Himself. What is most interesting is that this knowledge was lost (actually, repressed), even in its mutated form, in the 2nd century A.D., but then reappears in the Doctrine and Covenants. To quote just a small portion, D & C 132:19 says that, after having received eternal marriage, saints "...shall pass by the angels, and the gods, which are set there, to their exaltation and glory in all things."

Admittedly, we have gone quite a bit beyond John (one of the gnostics' favorite gospels). However, if Jesus did teach this doctrine, He surely said that it was not to be written down, so only small hints of it, like the introduction of the disciples to the Father, and the mention of the existence of an important name, would survive.

6. What does exaltation consist of?

We could read in D & C 132 (v. 20) what exaltation consists of, but I'd like to point out that there are some hints in these chapters of John (unfortunately, in the part before Jesus is speaking "plainly").

Read John 14:19; 15:16-17.

Sources consulted for this lesson include:

Bloom, Harold. 1992. The American Religion. New York: Simon and Schuster. (This book is not a very easy read, but it forms a significant part of today's perception of the Church by non-LDS intellectuals; arguably it deserves to.)

For a quick summary of gnosticism, see pp. 5-6 and 161-69 of Ehrman, Bart D. 1997. The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

If you don't have Ehrman's book, a pretty good on-online introduction can be found in the website for the PBS documentary, From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians.

Infobases, Inc. 1990-1998. Infobase Library. Infobases, Inc., a Bookcraft Company.

The Pistis Sophia and the Second Treatise of the Great Seth, from the Gnostic Society Library. I have placed a link to this here out of principle, because I think it's good to show my sources. However, I ought to comment that, as I said above, all gnostic texts have a great deal of falsehood mingled with truth, and these are no exception. They are pretty strange, and most of the other texts in the library are even stranger.

Last update: 20 June 1999