Acts 2:47

αἰνοῦντες τὸν Θεὸν : a favourite expression with St. Luke, cf. Gospel Acts 2:13; Acts 2:20; Acts 19:37; Acts 3:8-9, elsewhere only in Romans 15:11 (a quotation), and Revelation 19:5, with dative of person, W.H [135] The praise refers not merely to their thanksgivings at meals, but is characteristic of their whole devotional life both in public and private; and their life of worship and praise, combined with their liberality and their simplicity of life, helped to secure for them the result given in the following words, and an unmolested hearing in the Temple “Hunc inveniunt (favorem) qui Deum laudant” Bengel. αἰνέω is very frequent in the LXX, and nearly always of the praise of God, but cf. Genesis 49:8; Proverbs 31:28; Proverbs 31:30-31, Sir 44:1, etc. ἔχοντες χάριν : if the life of the Church at this stage has been compared with that of her divine Master, inasmuch as it increased in wisdom and stature, another point of likeness may be found in the fact that the Church, like Christ, was in favour with God and man. χάριν : very frequent in St. Luke's Gospel and the Acts (Friedrich), only three times in the Gospel of St. John, and not at all in St. Matthew or St. Mark. In the O.T. it is often used of finding favour in the sight of God, and in the N.T. in a similar sense, cf. Luke 1:30; Acts 7:46. It is also used in the O.T. of favour, kindness, goodwill, especially from a superior to an inferior (Genesis 18:3; Genesis 32:5, etc.), so too in the N.T., here, and in Acts 7:10. See further note on Acts 14:3. In Luke's Gospel eight times, in Acts seventeen times. See also Plummer's full note on Luke 4:22, Sanday and Headlam's Romans, p. 10, and Grimm-Thayer, sub v. Rendall would render “giving Him thanks before all the people,” and he refers to the fact that the phrase is always so rendered elsewhere (though once wrongly translated, Hebrews 12:28). But the phrase is also found in LXX, Exodus 33:12; Esther 6:5; Esther 6:5 (see also Wetstein, in loco) in the sense first mentioned. ὁ δὲ κύριος προσετίθει, i.e., the Lord Christ, cf. Acts 2:36 (as Holtzmann, Wendt, Weiss, amongst others). The pure and simple life of the disciples doubtless commended them to the people, and made it easier for them to gain confidence, and so converts, but the growth of the Church, St. Luke reminds us, was not the work of any human agency or attractiveness. τοὺς σωζομένους : naturally connected with the prophecy in Acts 2:21 (cf. Acts 5:40), so that the work of salvation there attributed to Jehovah by the Old Testament Prophet is here the work of Christ the inference is again plain with regard to our Lord's divinity. The expression is rightly translated in R.V. (so too in 1 Corinthians 1:18; 2 Corinthians 2:15. See Burton, Moods and Tenses in N. T. Greek, pp. 57, 58). It has nothing to do, as Wetstein well remarks, with the secret counsels of God, but relates to those who were obeying St. Peter's command in Acts 2:40. An apt parallel is given by Mr. Page from Thuc., vii., 44.

[135] Westcott and Hort's The New Testament in Greek: Critical Text and Notes.

Gift of Tongues, Acts 2:4. λαλεῖν ἑτέραις γλώσσαις. There can be no doubt that St. Luke's phrase (cf. γλώσσαις καιναῖς, Mark 16:17, W.H [136], margin, not text), taken with the context, distinctly asserts that the Apostles, if not the whole Christian assembly (St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, including the hundred-and-twenty), received the power of speaking in foreign languages, and that some of their hearers at all events understood them, Acts 2:8; Acts 2:11 (ἡμετέραις). (On the phrase as distinguished from those used elsewhere in Acts and in 1 Cor., see Grimm-Thayer, sub v., γλῶττα 2, and Blass, Acta Apost., p. 50, “ γλῶττα etiam ap. att. per se est lingua peregrina vel potius vocabulum peregrinum”.) Wendt and Matthias, who have recently given us a lengthy account of the events of the first Christian Pentecost, both hold that this speaking with tongues is introduced by St. Luke himself, and that it is a legendary embellishment from his hand of what actually took place; the speaking with tongues at Pentecost was simply identical with the same phenomenon described elsewhere in Acts 10:46; Acts 19:6, and in 1 Corinthians 12:14. This is plain from St. Peter's own words in Acts 11:15; Acts 11:17; so in Acts 19:6, the speaking with tongues is the immediate result of the outpouring of the Spirit. So too Wendt lays stress upon the fact that St. Paul says λαλεῖν γλώσσαις or γλώσση, but not λαλ. ἑτέρ. γλ. The former was evidently the original mode of describing the phenomenon, to which Luke recurs in his own description in Acts 10:46 and Acts 19:6, whereas in the passage before us his language represents the miraculous enhancement of the events of Pentecost. M'Giffert, in the same way, thinks that the writer of Acts, far removed moved from the events, could hardly avoid investing even the common phenomena of the Glossolalia with marvel and mystery. Wendt however admits that this embellishment was already accomplished by Christian tradition before Luke. But if St. Luke must have had every means of knowing from St. Paul the character of the speaking with tongues at Corinth, it does not seem unfair to maintain that he also had means of knowing from the old Palestinian Christians, who had been in union with the Church at Jerusalem from the beginning, e.g., from a John Mark, or a Mnason (ἀρχαῖος μαθητής, Acts 21:16), the exact facts connected with the great outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost (Schmid, Biblische Theologie, pp. 278, 279). But it is further to be noted that Wendt by no means denies that there was a miraculous element, as shown in the outpouring of the Spirit, in the events of the Pentecostal Feast, but that he also considers it quite unlikely that Luke's introduction of a still further miraculous element was prompted by a symbolising tendency, a desire to draw a parallel between the Christian Pentecost and the miraculous delivery of the Law, according to the Jewish tradition that the one voice which proceeded from Sinai divided into seventy tongues, and was heard by the seventy nations of the world, each in their mother tongue (so Zeller, Pfleiderer, Hilgenfeld, Spitta, Jüngst and Matthias, and so apparently Clemen in his “Speaking with Tongues,” Expository Times, p. 345, 1899). But in the first place there is no convincing evidence at the early date of the Christian Pentecost of any connection in Jewish tradition between the Feast of Pentecost and the giving of the Law on Sinai (cf. Schmid, Biblische Theologie, p. 286; Hamburger, Real-Encyclopädie des Judentums, i., 7, 1057, and Holtzmann, Apostelgeschichte, p. 330), and it is significant that neither Philo nor Josephus make any reference to any such connection; and in the next place it is strange, as Wendt himself points out, that if Luke had started with the idea of the importance of any such symbolism, no reference should be made to it in the subsequent address of Peter, whereas even in the catalogue of the nations there is no reference of any kind to the number seventy; the number actually given, Acts 2:9; Acts 2:11, might rather justify the farfetched notice of Holtzmann (u. s., p. 331), that a reference is meant to the sixteen grandsons of Noah, Genesis 10:1-2; Genesis 10:6; Genesis 10:21. Certainly Hebrews 2:2-4 cannot, as Schmid well points out against Holtzmann, lead to any such connection of ideas as the μερισμοὶ πνεύμ. ἁγ. are evidently the distribution of the gifts of the Spirit. We may readily admit that the miracle on the birthday of the Christian Church was meant to foreshadow the universal progress of the new faith, and its message for all mankind without distinction of nation, position, or age. But even if the Jewish tradition referred to above was in existence at this early date, we have still to consider whether the narrative in Acts could possibly be a copy of it, or dependent upon it. According to the tradition, a voice was to be expected from Heaven which would be understood by different men in their mother tongues, but in our narrative the Apostles themselves speak after the manner of men in these tongues. For to suppose that the Apostles all spoke one and the same language, but that the hearers were enabled to understand these utterances, each in his own language, is not only to do violence to the narrative, but simply to substitute one miraculous incident for another. Nor again, as Wendt further admits, is there any real ground for seeing in the miraculous event under consideration a cancelling of the confusion of tongues at Babel which resulted from rebellion against God, for the narrative does not contain any trace of the conception of a unity of language to which the Jewish idea appears to have tended as a contrast to the confusion of Babel (Test. xii., Patr., Jud., xxv). The unity is not one of uniformity of speech but of oneness of Spirit and in the Spirit. At the same time there was a peculiar fitness in the fact that the first and most abundant bestowal of this divine gift should be given at a Feast which was marked above all others by the presence of strangers from distant lands, that a sign should thus be given to them that believed not, and that the firstfruits of a Gentile harvest should be offered by the Spirit to the Father (Iren., Adv. Haer, iii., 17), an assurance to the Apostles of the greatness and universality of the message which they were commissioned to deliver. But there is no reason to suppose that this power Of speaking in foreign languages was a permanent gift. In the first place the Greek language was known throughout the Roman Empire, and in the next place Acts 14:11 (see in loco) seems to forbid any such view. The speaking with tongues in Acts 2 and in other passages of the N.T. may be classed as identical in so far as each was the effect of the divine Πνεῦμα, each a miraculous spiritual gift, marking a new epoch of spiritual life. But in Acts we have what we have not elsewhere the speaking in foreign tongues this was not the case in Corinth; there the speaking with tongues was absolutely unintelligible, it could not be understood without an interpreter, i.e., without another gift of the divine Spirit, viz., interpretation, 1 Corinthians 12:10; 1 Corinthians 12:30 (the word unknown inserted in A.V. in 1 Corinthians 14 is unfortunate), and the fact that the Apostle compares the speaking with tongues to a speaking in foreign languages shows that the former was itself no speaking in foreign tongues, since two identical things do not admit of comparison (Schmid, u. s., pp. 288, 289).

[136] Westcott and Hort's The New Testament in Greek: Critical Text and Notes.

Peter might well express his belief that Cornelius and those who spoke with tongues had also received the Holy Ghost, cf. Acts 10:44; Acts 11:17; Acts 11:24, in loco; but it does not follow that the gift bestowed upon them was identical with that bestowed at Pentecost there were diversities of gifts from the bounty of the One Spirit. Felten, Apostelgeschichte, p. 78; Evans in Speaker's Commentary on 1 Cor., p. 334; Plumptre, B.D. 1 “Tongues, Gift of”; Weizsäcker, Apostolic Age, ii., pp. 272, 273, E.T., and Feine, Eine Vorkanonische Ueberlieferung des Lukas, n., p. 167; Zöckler, Apostelgeschichte, p. 177; Page, Acts of the Apostles, note on chap. Acts 2:4; and A. Wright, Some N. T. Problems, p. 277 ff.

The objection urged at length by Wendt and Spitta that foreign languages could not have been spoken, since in that case there was no occasion to accuse the Apostles of drunkenness, but that ecstatic incoherent utterances of devotion and praise might well have seemed to the hearers sounds produced by revelry or madness (cf. 1 Corinthians 14:23), is easily met by noting that the utterances were not received with mockery by all but only by some, the word ἕτεροι apparently denoting quite a different class of hearers, who may have been unacquainted with the language spoken, and hence regarded the words as an unintelligible jargon.

Spitta attempts to break up Acts 2:1-13 into two sources, 1 a, 4, 12, 13, belonging to A, and simply referring to a Glossolalia like that at Corinth, whilst the other verses are assigned to [137] and the Redactor, and contain a narrative which could only have been derived from the Jewish tradition mentioned above, and introducing the notion of foreign tongues at a date when the Glossolalia had ceased to exist, and so to be understood. Spitta refers συμπληροῦσθαι Acts 2:1 to the filling up of the number of the Apostles in chap. 1, so that his source A begins καὶ ἐν τῷ συμπλ.… ἐπλήσθησαν πάντες π. ἁγ., Apostelgeschichte, p. 52. It is not surprising that Hilgenfeld should speak of the narrative as one which cannot be thus divided, upon which as he says Spitta has in vain essayed his artificial analysis.

[137] Codex Vaticanus (sæc. iv.), published in photographic facsimile in 1889 under the care of the Abbate Cozza-Luzi.

Community of Goods. The key to the two passages, Acts 2:42 ff. and Acts 4:32 ff., is to be found in the expression in which they both agree, occurring in Acts 2:45 and Acts 4:35, καθότι ἄν τις χρείαν εἶχεν. Such expressions indicate, as we have seen, not reckless but judicious charity (see also Ramsay, St. Paul, etc., p. 373, and reading in, Acts 2:45); they show wise management, as in early days St. Chrysostom noted in commenting on the words, so that the Christians did not act recklessly like many philosophers among the Greeks, of whom some gave up their lands, others cast great quantities of money into the sea, which was no contempt of riches, but only folly and madness (Hom., vii.). Not that St. Luke's glowing and repeated description (on St. Luke's way of sometimes repeating himself as here, see Harris, Four Lectures on the Western Text, p. 85) is to be confined to the exercise of mere almsgiving on the part of the Church. Both those who had, and those who had not, were alike the inheritors of a kingdom which could only be entered by the poor in spirit, alike members of a family and a household in which there was one Master, even Christ, in Whose Name all who believed were brethren. In this poverty of spirit, in this sense of brotherhood, “the poor man knew no shame, the rich no haughtiness” (Chrys.).

But whilst men were called upon to give ungrudgingly, they were not called upon to give of necessity: what each one had was still his own, τὰ ὑπάρχοντα αὐτῷ, Acts 4:32, although not even one (οὐδὲ εῖς) of them reckoned it so; the daily ministration in Acts 6:1 seems to show that no equal division of property amongst all was intended; the act of Barnabas was apparently one of charity rather than of communism, for nothing is said of an absolute surrender of all that he had; the act of Ananias and Sapphira was entirely voluntary, although it presented itself almost as a duty (Ramsay, u. s.); Mark's mother still retains her home at Jerusalem, Acts 12:12, and it would seem that Mnason too had a dwelling there (see on Acts 21:16). At Joppa, Acts 9:36; Acts 9:39, and at Antioch, Acts 11:29, there was evidently no absolute equality of earthly possessions Tabitha helps the poor out of her own resources, and every man as he prospered sent his contributions to the Church at Jerusalem.

It is sometimes urged that this enthusiasm of charity and of the spirit (ἐνθουσιασμός, as Blass calls it), which filled at all events the Church at Jerusalem, was due to the expectation of Christ's immediate return, and that in the light of that event men regarded lands and possessions as of no account, even if ordinary daily work was not neglected (O. Holtzmann, Neutest. Zeitgeschichte, p. 233). But it is strange that if this is the true account of the action of the Church at Jerusalem, a similar mode of life and charity should not have found place in other Churches, e.g., in the Church at Thessalonica, where the belief in Christ's speedy return was so overwhelmingly felt (Felten). No picture could be more extraordinary than that drawn by O. Holtzmann of the Christian Church at Jerusalem, driven by the voice of Christian prophets to enjoin an absolutely compulsory community of goods in expectation of the nearness of the Parousia, and of Ananias and Sapphira as the victims of this tyrannical product of fanaticism and overwrought excitement. It is a relief to turn from such a strange perversion of the narrative to the enthusiastic language in which, whilst insisting on its idealising tendency, Renan and Pfleiderer alike have recognised the beauty of St. Luke's picture, and of the social transformation which was destined to renew the face of the earth, which found its pattern of serving and patient love in Jesus the Friend of the poor, whose brotherhood opened a place of refuge for the oppressed, the destitute, the weak, who enjoyed in the mutual love of their fellows a foretaste of the future kingdom in which God Himself will wipe all tears from their eyes. Whatever qualifications must be made in accepting the whole description given us by Renan and Pfleiderer, they were at least right in recognising the important factor of the Person of Jesus, and the probability that during His lifetime He had Himself laid the foundations of the social movement which so soon ennobled and blessed His Church. It is far more credible that the disciples should have continued the common life in which they had lived with their Master than that they should have derived a social system from the institutions of the Essenes. There is no proof of any historical connection between this sect and the Apostolic Church, nor can we say that the high moral standard and mode of common life adopted by the Essenes, although in some respects analogous to their own, had any direct influence on the followers of Christ. Moreover, with points of comparison, there were also points of contrast. St. Luke's notice, Acts 2:46, that the believers continued steadfastly in the Temple, stands out in contrast to the perpetual absence of the Essenes from the Temple, to which they sent their gifts (Jos., Ant., xviii. 2, 5); the common meals of the Essene brotherhood naturally present a likeness to St. Luke's description of the early Christian Church, but whilst the Essenes dined together, owing to their scrupulosity in avoiding all food except what was ceremonially pure, the Christians saw in every poor man who partook of their common meal the real Presence of their Lord. Of all contemporary sects it may no doubt be said that the Christian society resembled most nearly the Essenes, but with this admission Weizsäcker well adds: “The Essenes, through their binding rules and their suppression of individualism, were, from their very nature, an order of limited extent. In the new Society the moral obligation of liberty reigned, and disclosed an unlimited future,” Apostolic Age, i., 58 (E.T.). It is often supposed that the after-poverty of the Church in Jerusalem, Romans 15:26; Galatians 2:10, etc., was the result of this first enthusiasm of love and charity, and that the failure of a community of goods in the mother city prevented its introduction elsewhere. But not only is the above view of the “communism” of the early Christians adverse to this supposition, but there were doubtless many causes at work which may account for the poverty of the Saints in Jerusalem, cf. Rendall, Expositor, Nov., 1893, p. 322. The collection for the Saints, which occupies such a prominent place in St. Paul's life and words, may not have been undertaken for any exceptional distress as in the earlier case of the famine in Judæa, Acts 11:26, but we cannot say how severely the effects of the famine may have affected the fortunes of the Jerusalem Christians. We must too take into account the persecution of the Christians by their rich neighbours; the wealthy Sadducees were their avowed opponents. From the first it was likely that the large majority of the Christians in Jerusalem would possess little of this world's goods, and the constant increase in the number of the disciples would have added to the difficulty of maintaining the disproportionate number of poor. But we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that there was another and a fatal cause at work love itself had grown cold the picture drawn by St. James in his Epistle is painfully at variance with the golden days which he had himself seen, when bitter jealousy and faction were unknown, for all were of one heart and one soul, Zahn, Skizzen aus dem Leben der alten Kirche, p. 39 ff.; Zöckler, u.s., pp. 191, 192; Wendt, in loco; M‘Giffert, Apostolic Age, p. 67; Conybeare, “Essenes,” Hastings' B.D.; Kaufmann, Socialism and Communism, p. 5 ff.