Richard N. Longenecker, “The Acts of the Apostles,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: John and Acts, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 9 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1981), 268–272.

E. The Coming of the Holy Spirit (2:1–41)

Luke’s fourth constitutive factor that undergirds the expansion of the early Christian mission is the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the assembled believers at Pentecost. To this the other three factors have pointed. And now Luke gives us an extended account of it that includes the baptism of the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost and Peter’s sermon to the multitude and welds these separate incidents into a unified whole.

Though all four Gospels include the preaching of John the Baptist, only Matthew and Luke have preserved the Baptist’s distinction between his baptism with water and the baptism to be conferred by the one to come, the “one more powerful” than he was (Matt 3:11; Luke 3:16). And Luke alone connects the Baptist’s prophecy of a baptism “with the Holy Spirit and with fire” with the miracle at Pentecost (Acts 1:5; 11:16). So Luke brings John’s baptism of Jesus in the Jordan and the Spirit’s baptism of assembled believers at Pentecost into a parallel in which each event is seen as the final constitutive factor for all that follows in the ministry of Jesus (cf. Luke’s Gospel) and the mission of the early church. (cf. Acts).

1. The miracle of Pentecost (2:1–13)

1

Luke describes the miracle of the coming of the Holy Spirit, with its accompanying signs, in four short verses, remarkable for their nuances. The miracle occurred on the festival known in Late Judaism as Pentecost (hē pentēkostē, “fiftieth”), which, according to Leviticus 23:15–16 (cf. Deut 16:9–12; Jos. Antiq. III, 252 [x.6]; SBK, 2:597–602), was to be celebrated on the “day after the seventh Sabbath” and hence on the fiftieth day after Passover. It was originally the festival of the firstfruits of the grain harvest (Exod 23:16; Lev 23:17–22; Num 28:26–31); and it was called the Feast of Weeks because it came after a period of seven weeks of harvesting that began with the offering of the first barley sheaf during the Passover celebration and ended with the wheat harvest. By the time of the first Christian century, however, it was considered the anniversary of the giving of the law at Mount Sinai (as deduced from the chronological note at Exod 19:1) and as a time for the annual renewal of the Mosaic covenant (Jub 6:17; b Peshaim 68b; M Tanchuma 26c); and it was therefore looked upon as one of the three great pilgrim festivals of Judaism (along with Passover preceding it and Tabernacles some four months later).

Now no one who had been a companion of the apostle Paul (or, for that matter, even a distant admirer, should Lukan authorship of Acts be denied) could have failed to have been impressed by the fact that it was on the Jewish festival of Pentecost that the Spirit came so dramatically upon the early believers in Jerusalem. It is this significance that Luke emphasizes as he begins his Pentecost narrative; viz., that whereas Pentecost was for Judaism the day of the giving of the law, for Christians it is the day of the coming of the Holy Spirit. So for Luke the coming of the Spirit upon the early Christians at Pentecost is not only a parallel to the Spirit’s coming upon Jesus at his baptism, it is also both in continuity with and in contrast to the law. To be sure, Luke does not draw out from this a portrayal of Jesus as either the giver of a new Torah or himself the embodiment of such a Torah (though if Matthew or John had written Acts, they might have done something like that). Rather, by paralleling Jesus’ baptism with the experience of Jesus’ early followers at Pentecost, Luke is showing that the mission of the Christian church, as was the ministry of Jesus, is dependent upon the coming of the Holy Spirit. And by his stress on Pentecost as the day when the miracle took place, he is also suggesting (1) that the Spirit’s coming is in continuity with God’s purposes in giving the law and yet (2) that the Spirit’s coming signals the essential difference between the Jewish faith and commitment to Jesus, for whereas the former is Torah centered and Torah directed, the latter is Christ centered and Spirit directed—all of which sounds very much like Paul.

As to just where the believers were when they experienced the coming of the Spirit, Luke is somewhat vague. His emphasis is on the “when” and not at all on the “where” of the event. So all he tells us is that “they were all together in one place,” which he refers to in the following verse as “the house” (ton oikon).

Many have taken this to be a reference to the Jerusalem temple because (1) oikos was at times used to refer to the temple (cf. Isa 6:4 LXX; Acts 7:47; Jos. Antiq. VIII, 65–75 [iii.1–3]); (2) Luke’s Gospel closes with the statement that Jesus’ disciples “stayed continually at the temple, praising God” (Luke 24:53); and (3) in the temple precincts they would have had the best opportunity of addressing a large crowd. Yet apart from this doubtful instance in Acts 2 and his report of Stephen’s speech (ch. 7), Luke elsewhere always refers to the temple by to hieron (twenty-two times); and where oikos is occasionally used by others of the Jerusalem temple, it is always in a context that leaves no doubt of what is meant. Furthermore, the articular intensive pronoun to auto (“in one place,” NIV) is best interpreted as referring to its antecedent in 1:12–26, “the upper room” (to hyperōon). Therefore it is likely that Luke meant us to picture that same upper room as the setting for the miracle of the Spirit’s coming and the place from where the disciples first went out to proclaim the gospel.

2

There is, of course, nothing necessarily sensory about the Holy Spirit. Yet God in his providence often accompanies his Spirit’s working by visible and audible signs—particularly at certain crises in redemptive history. This he does to assure his people of his presence, and usually within the appreciation—though not always the expectation—of his own. In vv. 2–4 three signs of the Spirit’s coming are reported to have appeared, each of them—wind, fire, inspired speech—being considered in Jewish tradition as a sign of God’s presence.

Wind as a sign of God’s Spirit is rooted linguistically in the fact that both the Hebrew word rûaḥ. and the Greek word pneuma mean either wind or spirit, depending on the context, and this allows a rather free association of the two ideas (cf. John 3:8). Ezekiel had prophesied of the wind as the breath of God blowing over the dry bones in the valley of his vision and filling them with new life (Ezek 37:9–14), and it was this wind of God’s Spirit that Judaism looked forward to as ushering in the final Messianic Age. Thus Luke tells us that as a sign of the Spirit’s coming upon the early followers of Jesus, there was “a sound like the blowing of a violent wind.” Just why he emphasized the “sound” (ēchos) of the blowing of the “wind” (pnoē) is difficult to say. Perhaps it was because he wanted to refer back later to “this sound” (tēs phōnēs tautēs, v. 6). Perhaps, also, he wanted to retain the parallel with the Pentecost tradition of the giving of the law. In certain sectors of Judaism the events connected with the giving of the law were couched in terms of God’s having caused a “sound” to arise on Mount Sinai. This “sound” then changed into a “fire,” which all could perceive as a “language” (cf. Philo, De Decalogo 33). But whatever his exact rationale, Luke’s main point is that this “sound like the blowing of a violent wind” that “came from heaven” and “filled the whole house” symbolized to all present—in a manner well within their appreciation—the presence of God’s Spirit among them in a way more intimate, personal, and powerful than they had ever before experienced.

3

Fire as a symbol of the divine presence was well known among first-century Jews (cf. the burning bush [Exod 3:2–5], the pillar of fire that guided Israel by night through the wilderness [Exod 13:21], the consuming fire on Mount Sinai [Exod 24:17], and the fire that hovered over the wilderness tabernacle [Exod 40:38]). Also, 1 Enoch depicts God’s heavenly court as “surrounded by tongues of fire” (14:8–25; cf. 71:5, though 1 Enoch 37–71 may be post-Christian). John the Baptist is reported as having explicitly linked the coming of the Spirit with fire (cf. his prophecy that the Messiah would baptize “with the Holy Spirit and with fire” [Matt 3:11; Luke 3:16]). The “tongues of fire” (glōssai hōsei pyros) here are probably not to be equated with the “other tongues” (heterais glōssais) of v. 4 but should be taken as visible representations, given in the context of the appreciation of those there gathered, of the overshadowing presence of the Spirit of God.

Also significant is Luke’s statement that these tokens of the Spirit’s presence “separated and came to rest on each of them.” This seems to suggest that, though under the old covenant the divine presence rested on Israel as a corporate entity and upon many of its leaders for special purposes, under the new covenant, as established by Jesus and inaugurated at Pentecost, the Spirit now rests upon each believer individually. In other words, though the corporate and individual aspects of redemption cannot actually be separated, the emphasis in the proclamation of redemption from Pentecost onward is on the personal relationship of God to the believer through the Spirit, with all corporate relationships resulting from this.

4

In OT times prophetic utterances were regularly associated with the Spirit’s coming upon particular persons for special purposes (cf. Eldad and Medad [Num 11:26–29]; Saul [1 Sam 10:6–12]; et al.). In Judaism, however, the belief arose that with the passing of the last of the writing prophets in the early postexilic period the spirit of prophecy had ceased in Israel. Since then, therefore, God spoke to his people only through the Torah as interpreted by the teachers (cf. such passages as the Prologue to Sirach and ch. 1 of Pirke Aboth). But Judaism also expected that with the coming of the Messianic Age there would be a special outpouring of God’s Spirit, in fulfillment of Ezekiel 37, and that prophecy would once again flourish. And this is exactly what Luke portrays as having taken place at Pentecost among the followers of Jesus: “All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.”

The “tongues” here are often identified with ecstatic utterances of the sort Paul discusses in 1 Corinthians 12–14. This identification is made largely because (1) in both instances (1 Cor 12–14; Acts 2) the expression “other tongues” (heterais glōssais, heteroglōssois) is used and (2) because the verb translated “enabled” or “gave utterance” (apophthengomai) is frequently used in other Greek literature in connection with ecstatics, whether of the givers of oracles (cf. Diodorus of Sicily Historical Library 16.27.1; Plutarch Pythiae Oraculis 23) or of the interpreters of oracles (cf. Mic 5:12; Zech 10:2). But the words spoken at Pentecost under the Spirit’s direction were immediately recognized by those who heard them as being languages then current, while at Corinth no one could understand what was said till someone present received a gift of interpretation. And the verb apophthengomai used by Luke in Acts (its only three NT occurrences) appears in contexts that stress clarity of speech and understanding: here in 2:4; in 2:14 of Peter’s address to the crowd at Pentecost; and in 26:25 of Paul’s defense before Agrippa II, where it is explicitly contrasted with mainomai, which speaks of babblings stemming from madness over which the speaker has no control. Therefore, the tongues in 2:4 are best understood as “languages” and should be taken in accord with Philo’s reference to understandable language as one of the three signs of God’s presence in the giving of the law at Mount Sinai (De Decalogo 33).

The coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost was of utmost significance both theologically and practically for the early church. As for the question Was Pentecost the birthday of the Christian church? a great deal depends upon what one means by the term “church” (ekklēsia). Amid a variety of usages, the word appears in the NT for both “the body of Christ” (meaning the redeemed of all ages) and “an instrument of service” (distinguishable from the nation Israel) used by God for his redemptive purposes. Of the first, the church as the body of Christ, it can hardly be said that it had its beginning only at Pentecost. What can be said, however, and what Luke seems to be stressing in reporting that the tongues of fire separated and came to rest on each believer individually, is (1) that the relationship of the Spirit to the members of the body of Christ became much more intimate and personal at Pentecost, in fulfillment of Jesus’ promise (later recorded in John 14:17) that the Spirit who “lives with you” (par hymin menei) “will be in you” (en hymin estai), and (2) that at Pentecost a new model of divine redemption was established as characteristic for life in the new covenant—one that, while incorporating both individual and corporate redemption, begins with the former in order to include the latter.

With regard to the church as an instrument of service, called by God to take up the mission formerly entrusted to Israel, Luke is certainly presenting the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost as the church’s birthday. So he parallels the Spirit’s coming on Jesus at his baptism with the Spirit’s coming at Pentecost on the earliest followers, for neither Jesus’ ministry nor the mission of the early church would have been possible apart from the Spirit’s empowering. So also Luke emphasizes Jesus’ explicit command to the disciples to stay in Jerusalem till they were empowered from on high by the Spirit (Luke 24:49; Acts 1:4–5, 8).