Acts 2 - Introduction

Excursus A. On the Pentecostal Miracle.

On the day of Pentecost, the first part of the work of the divine Founder of the Christian Church was completed when the Holy Ghost was given by the Father to the ‘hundred and twenty' gathered together in the name of Jesus. A special grace and power was doubtless conferred on those on whom the Spirit had descended; but the special power then conferred was soon withdrawn from men, the grace then given remained for ever with the Church of Christ. The special grace included a certain power to work miracles a power, though (comparatively speaking), rarely used even in the earliest times, and which was gradually withdrawn. In the Fathers, very few authenticated instances are given of miracles worked by men on whom the Spirit was not specially poured at Pentecost. The first leaders of the followers of the Crucified, owed to ‘the Spirit' that high wisdom which enabled them to lay, with such rare skill, such generous devotion and true love, the first stories of the Christian faith. The Spirit, too, we may affirm, teaching them all things, bringing, too, all things which the Master had said, into their remembrance, guided them when they wrote those holy memoirs and letters men call the New Testament Scriptures. We are tempted to forget the grander issues of the Pentecostal miracle in the special gift which seems to have been the first apparent result of the descent of the Spirit, the speaking with tongues; but this was merely the expression of deep thankfulness, the glorious utterance of grateful hearts conscious of the mighty change wrought in them by the Spirit sent from heaven. This gift of tongues was one of the special miraculous powers bestowed at Pentecost on the ‘hundred and twenty' disciples then assembled together, and seems to have been an ecstatic expression of thanks and praise to God. The speaker, rapt, though not losing all command of himself, not always fully conscious of what he was uttering, poured out his ecstatic stream of praise, thanking God for His glorious mighty works, in words, in a language not usually comprehended by the bystanders.

These utterances often needed an interpreter. At times the speaker, we know, interpreted for himself, but generally the gift of interpretation of these ecstatic sayings was bestowed on another. We are told one spoke (in tongues), and another interpreted. The miracle of the ‘gift, of tongues,' as described on that memorable Pentecost, really differed in few particulars from those strange manifestations of the Spirit St. Paul writes of in his First Corinthian Epistle. The ‘tongues' in the Corinthian Church needed an interpreter, either the speaker himself or else some other inspired person, as the utterances were in a language not understood by the bystanders. At that ‘Pentecost,' however, no such interpreter was needed. The inspired ones spoke then as the Spirit gave them utterance, in new languages certainly; but on that occasion each new language was addressed to groups of pilgrims and travellers familiar with the sounds. Then we read how the Greek-speaking Jew heard one inspired man proclaiming the glorious words of his Saviour God in his own Greek. The strangers of Rome and Italy listened to another uttering the same praises in their familiar Latin. The eastern pilgrim caught the same strange, beautiful words of praise and thanksgiving spoken by others of that inspired company in the different oriental dialects they knew so well. In this particular only differs the ‘gift of tongues' we read of on that first Pentecost after the Lord had risen, from the ‘gift of tongues' spoken of at such length by St. Paul (1 Corinthians 14). The first instance of this new and marvellous power needed no subsequent interpretation. The new language in which each utterance was conveyed on that occasion was comprehended by each group of listeners at once. We are led, then, to the conclusion that the gift of tongues was one of the special powers bestowed when the Spirit descended at Pentecost; that it was by no means a permanent and abiding power with any one, but was used in those days when the revelation of the power of Christ came for the first time in all its awful truth upon the disciples, to enable them better to pour out their new song of praise and thanksgiving. These glorious thoughts seem to have been uttered at times in dialects known and familiar to some among the bystanders, as at this Pentecost; at times the Spirit seems to have given them utterance in a language no one present understood: in that case needing an interpreter (1 Corinthians 14). But it is utterly at variance with all early record to suppose this ‘gift of tongues' was a power of speaking in various languages, to be used by the first believers when they preached the Gospel in distant lands; for neither in the Acts nor the Epistles, nor in early ecclesiastical history, is any intimation given that the ‘Twelve' or the ‘hundred and twenty,' or any of the converts to Christianity daring the first hundred years after the resurrection, were supernaturally endowed with power to preach the Gospel in different languages which they had never learned. On the contrary, the currently-received interpretation of Acts 14:11 points to St. Paul, ‘who spoke with tongues more than all,' not understanding the dialect of Lycaonia. St. Jerome, too, tells us St. Paul was accompanied by Titus as an interpreter (Estius on 2 Corinthians 11); and Papias (Eusebius, H. E. iii. 39) writes of Peter as attended by Mark, who acted in a like capacity in the missionary journeys of that great apostle. In the early Fathers on the mysterious nature of the ‘gift of tongues,' there is an almost total silence. To them evidently it was no mere power of speaking in various languages; it was something quite different, something they could not understand or explain, and which had evidently ceased when the first generation of believers had passed away. One famous inspired passage already quoted from the First Corinthian Epistle forbids any notion of this power being used for teaching purposes in their own congregation at home in Corinth, and totally excludes all idea of the ‘tongues' as an instrument for missionary work among strange peoples abroad; for its chief characteristic is that it is unintelligible. The man speaks mysteries, prays, blesses, gives thanks in the Spirit, but no one understands him.

We have already called attention to the indisputable fact that the miraculous gifts of the first days, bestowed on the Church for a definite purpose, when the apostles and those who had learned Christ from their lips had passed away, were gradually but quickly withdrawn from men. And among these supernatural powers we can believe that the earliest withdrawn were those new tongues first heard in their strange sweetness, needing then no interpreter on that Pentecost morning those tongues which during the birth-throes of Christianity gave utterance to the rapturous joy and thankfulness of the first believers. They were a power though which, if misused, might lead men to confusion, to feverish dreamings, to morbid imaginings, to a condition of thought which would utterly unfit men and women for the stern and earnest duties of their several callings; in a word, would lead to a life unreal and unhealthy. And so that chapter of sacred history which tells of these communings of men with the unseen, which speaks of those thrilling moments of rapt joy, of those sweet, unearthly utterances which now and again beautified with a beauty not of earth the lives of those brave witnesses who first set the example of giving up all for the love of Christ that chapter was closed for ever, perhaps even before those ‘hundred and twenty' and the generation who had listened to their words had fallen asleep in Jesus.

The latter part of this Excursus is mainly taken from a paper contributed by one of the editors of this Commentary on the ‘Acts ' to the Bible Educator on the whole question of this miracle, and on some of its results. See also Professor Plumptre's exhaustive article, in Dr. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, on the Gift of Tongues; also for a different view from that advocated above, compare Bishop Wordsworth's interesting comment on this passage of the ‘ Acts. ' DeWette, Apostelgeschichte, pp. 23-36, ed. 1870, g ives an able summary of the views of that school, which assumes that all accounts of miraculous interference are simply mythic.

Excursus B.

On the Question whether ‘Community of Goods' was the Practice GENERALLY AMONG THE EARLY CHRISTIANS.

On first reading the little descriptive pictures of the Church of the first days by the writer of the Acts in chap. Acts 2:44-45; Acts 4:32-35, it would appear as though the first believers literally carried out such charges of the Master as, ‘Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not' (Luke 12:33), and, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go thy way and sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow ME' (Matthew 19:21). But, on careful examination of other early Christian records contained in these same ‘Acts,' and in the Epistles of the New Testament, it will be quickly seen that this community of goods could not have been general, even in the little Jerusalem congregation, for (a) the story of the death of Ananias and Sapphira an episode in the early Church which must have happened very soon after the Pentecost miracle shows most clearly that this giving up of possessions into a common stock was no necessary condition of Christian membership. No rule of this nature existed in the early Church; no such apostolic injunction was ever hinted at. ‘Whilst (thy possession) remained,' said St. Peter to Ananias, ‘was it not thine own? and after it was sold, was it not in thine own power?' Ananias might have retained any part of it he wished, and still have remained a member of the Jerusalem congregation. His sin, for which he was so terribly punished, consisted in his pretending to give more than he really had done. (b) Some fourteen years later (Acts 12:12) we find Mary, the mother of John and Mark evidently a person of consideration and authority in the Church possessing a house of her own in the city. The action of the Jerusalem Church in the days immediately succeeding the ascension of the Lord in this matter of community of goods was no attempt to engraft on the new society any rigid ascetic rule of life, such as was practised by the Essene sect among the Jews. It was simply a loving, longing wish to continue with as little difference as possible the simple, self-denying, unworldly life which Jesus lea with His disciples while on earth. It was an earnest striving to carry out to the letter such commands as we find in St. Luke 12:33. of which commands the inspired wisdom of the apostles soon saw the necessity of teaching an enlarged interpretation. The community of goods among the early Christians, apparently exclusively confined to Jerusalem, was not universal even there, and with the fall and destruction of the city (A.D. 70), if not before, ceased to be a practice of any portion of the Christian Church.

The inspired teaching of the Epistles of the New Testament clearly shows us what was the view taken by men like St. James and St. Paul of this question of property. They evidently had no idea of a general sharing of possessions among Christians, and never publicly urged on their converts a renunciation of their rank or property; on the contrary, they pressed home to all poor and rich, bond and free the duty of doing their best for their Master and their brother in that state of life in which they were placed by the providence of God. It is true that they urged everywhere on all orders and degrees of men, on Gentile as well as Jew, the severe high view of life instead of the low and self-indulgent one; yet they everywhere acknowledge and accept orders and degrees among men as the wise arrangements of Almighty God. Paul even declines to interfere with the relation of master and slave (Epistle to Philemon), preferring to leave the correction of this terrible exaggeration of class privilege to the inevitable action of the religion of Jesus on the hearts of men.

Whether Paul addresses one particular church (1 Corinthians 16:2; 2 Corinthians 9:5-7), or a group of churches (Galatians 2:10), or a prominent disciple (1 Timothy 6:17, and Philemon), his teaching ever proceeds from the assumption that rich and poor, nigh-born and low-born, in their several positions, were reckoned among the congregations who believed in Jesus. Even the austere and ascetic James, who certainly witnessed and most probably shared in the primitive community of goods in the Jerusalem Church, repeatedly rebukes the rich and powerful, not for possessing, but for misusing wealth and position (James 2:1-9; James 4:13-17; James 5:1-5).

It is no baseless theory which sees as the result of this community of goods, existing so generally in the Jerusalem Church, the extreme distress which, as early as the year A.D. 43, prevailed among the Jerusalem Christians. In spite of the most generous exertions of ‘the brethren' in Rome, in Greece, in Asia Minor, in Syria, this deep poverty seems to have continued to the last (that is, till A.D. 70, when the city was destroyed) in the mother Church of Christendom. Constant reference to the extreme poverty among.the Jerusalem Christians occurs in the busy life of St. Paul (see Acts 11:29; Acts 24:17; Galatians 2:10; Romans 15:26; 1Co 16:1; 2 Corinthians 8:4-14,

Acts 9:1-12). Nor is it improbable that the first great missionary leaders men like Paul, and Barnabas, and Luke, guided as they were by the Holy Ghost were deterred by the spectacle of helpless poverty presented by the Church of Jerusalem from sanctioning in other cities an enthusiasm which led men, through a desire of carrying out to the letter the self-denying commands of their Master, to throw up those grave and weighty responsibilities which accompany wealth and position, and thus to reduce themselves to a state of helpless dependence; for they saw in such a community all manly self-reliance, all generous effort, would, on the part of the individual, gradually cease to exist.

A deadly torpor, such as seems to have crept over and paralyzed the Jerusalem Christians, would by degrees have destroyed the energy of every Church whose members, by voluntarily renouncing rank and home and wealth, sought literally to fulfil their Lord's commands. Other ages have witnessed attempts more or less noble, even though mistaken, to revive the Jerusalem dream of a life where should exist no distinctions of ‘order' and class, and where literally all things should be possessed in common; but every such attempt has failed; sometimes ending in wild disorder, sometimes producing a society whose life and aims seemed utterly at variance with the teaching and the mind of Christ. I need scarcely allude here to the vows of poverty and self-renunciation of the famous Franciscan order, and to the hopes of its generous and devoted founder, Francis of Assisi vows, alas! too often broken; hopes, alas! cruelly deceived.

The estimate of Paul and his brother apostles was the true one; they judged rightly when they declined to interfere with the established order of things among civilised peoples, or to recognise in any way a state of society which, however beautiful in theory, in practice would effectually bar all progress, and which would only result in confusion and misery.