On the last night before he died, in the long farewell conversation with his disciples, Jesus gave the Spirit a name that appears nowhere else in the Bible outside of John’s writings. He called it the παράκλητος (paraklētos) — and it’s a word English can’t quite hold in one piece, which is why the translations all render it differently: Comforter in the old King James, Counselor in some, Helper in others, Advocate in others still.

The word comes from two Greek pieces: para, “alongside,” and a root meaning “to call.” Literally, “one called alongside” — someone summoned to stand next to you. In ordinary Greek it ran close to a legal term: the advocate who stands beside you in court, who speaks up for you, pleads your case, supports you when you can’t support yourself. So when Jesus promises the paraklētos, he’s promising someone who will come and stand alongside the disciples after he’s gone — to help them, defend them, comfort them, teach them, remind them of everything he said.

Then comes the detail that pulls the word in an unexpected direction. When Jesus first promises the Spirit, he calls it another Paraclete: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.” Another. Which means there was a first one — and the first advocate standing alongside the disciples was Jesus himself. The same word gets used of him. So the Spirit is another like him, a second advocate to take Jesus’ place when Jesus is gone, to do for the disciples what Jesus had been doing for them.

And a few sentences later Jesus says something that complicates it beautifully: “I will not leave you as orphans; I am coming to you.” Not “the Spirit is coming to you” — I am coming. In the space of a few verses, the Father will send another advocate, and Jesus himself is the one coming back, as if the coming of the Spirit and his own return were somehow the same arrival. The great Catholic scholar Raymond Brown caught this memorably: the “another Paraclete” of the farewell discourse is, in many ways, another Jesus — the presence of Jesus with the disciples after he has gone to the Father. So when the risen Jesus breathes that promised Spirit into the locked room, the paraklētos he gives is, in John especially, bound up with his own continuing presence — his promise not to leave them orphans, kept with his own breath. No other Gospel ties the Spirit so tightly to Jesus himself.