Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 2

Of all the feasts of the Jewish year, Pentecost was the one that attracted the largest number of pilgrims from distant lands. The dangers of travel by sea or land in the early spring or late autumn prevented their coming in any large numbers to the Passover or the Feast of Tabernacles. At no other feast would there have been representatives of so many nations. So, it may be noted, it was the Feast of Pentecost that St. Paul went up to keep repeatedly during his mission work in Greece and Asia. (See Notes on Acts 18:21; Acts 20:16.) Therefore, at no other time was the gift of the Spirit as likely to produce such direct and immediate results.

And suddenly there came a sound from heaven...—The description reminds us of the “sound of a trumpet” (Exodus 19:19; Hebrews 12:19) on Sinai, of the “great and strong wind” that rent the mountains on Horeb (1 Kings 19:11). Such a wind was now felt and heard, even as the wind, the breath, the Spirit of God, had moved upon the face of the waters, quickening them into life (Genesis 1:2).

A rushing mighty wind.—Better, a mighty breath borne onwards, so as to connect the English, as the Greek is connected, with St. Peter’s words that, “holy men of old spake as they were moved (literally, borne on) by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). The Greek word for “wind” is not that commonly so translated (anemos), but one from the same root as the Greek for “Spirit” (Pnoè and Pneuma—both from Pneô, “I breathe”), and rendered breath in Acts 17:25.

It is obviously chosen here as being better suited than the more common word for the supernatural inbreathing of which they were conscious, and which to many must have recalled the moment when their Lord had breathed on them, and said, Receive ye the Holy Ghost (John 20:22). Now, once more, they felt that light yet awful breathing which stirred every nerve to ecstasy; and it filled “the whole house,” as if in token of the wide range over which the new spiritual power was to extend its working, even to the whole Church, which is the House of God (1 Timothy 3:15), and to the uttermost parts of the earth.

There appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire.—Better, and tongues as of fire were seen by them, parted among them. The word translated “cloven” cannot possibly have that meaning. It is not uncommon (e.g., Acts 2:45; Matthew 27:35; Luke 22:17), and is always used in the sense of dividing or distributing. What the disciples saw would, perhaps, be best described in modern phrase as a shower of fiery tongues, coming, they knew not from where, lighting for a moment on each head, and then vanishing. The verb “it sat upon (namely, a tongue of fire)” is in the tense which expresses momentary, not continuous, action.

And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost.—The outward portent was but the sign of a greater spiritual wonder.

Until now, though they had been taught to pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13), and, we must believe, had found the answer to their prayer in secret and sacred influences and gradual growth in wisdom, they had never been conscious of its power as “filling” them—pervading the inner depths of personality, stimulating every faculty and feeling to a new intensity of life.

Now they felt, in St. Peter’s words, as borne onward (2 Peter 1:21), thinking thoughts and speaking words which were not their own, and which they could hardly even control. They had passed into a state which was one of rapturous ecstasy and joy.

We must not think of the gift as confined to the Apostles. The context shows that the writer speaks of all who were assembled, not excepting the women, as sharers in it .

And began to speak with other tongues.—Two facts have to be remembered as we enter upon the discussion of a question which is, beyond all doubt, difficult and mysterious:

1. If we receive Mark 16:9-20 as a true record of our Lord’s words, the disciples had, a few days or weeks before the Day of Pentecost, heard the promise that those who believed should speak with new tongues (Mark 16:17), that is, with new powers of utterance.
2. When St. Luke wrote his account of the Day of Pentecost, he must have had—partly through his companionship with St. Paul, partly from personal observation—a wide knowledge of the phenomena described as connected with the “tongues” in 1 Corinthians 14.

He uses the term in the sense in which St. Paul had used it. We have to read the narrative of the Acts in the light thrown upon it by the treatment in that chapter of the phenomena described by the very same words as the Pentecost wonder.

What, then, are those phenomena? Does the narrative of this chapter bring before us any in addition?

1. The utterance of the “tongue” is presented to us as entirely unconnected with the work of teaching. It is not a means of instruction. It does not edify any beyond the man who speaks (1 Corinthians 14:4). It is, in this respect, the very antithesis of “prophecy.” Men do not, as a rule, understand it, though God does (1 Corinthians 14:2). Here and there, some mind with a special gift of insight may be able to interpret with clear articulate speech what had been mysterious and dark (1 Corinthians 14:13). St. Paul desires to subject the exercise of the gift to the condition of the presence of such an interpreter (1 Corinthians 14:5; 1 Corinthians 14:27).
2. The free use of the gift makes him who uses it almost as a barbarian or foreigner to those who listen to him. He may utter prayers, or praises, or benedictions, but what he speaks is as the sound of a trumpet blown uncertainly, of flute or lyre played with unskilled hand, almost, we might say, in the words of our own poet, “like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh” (1 Corinthians 14:7–9).
3. Those who speak with tongues do well, for the most part, to confine their utterance to the solitude of their own chamber, or to the presence of friends who can share their rapture. When they make a more public display of it, it produces results that stand in singular contrast with each other. It is a sign to them that believe not (1 Corinthians 14:22), that is, it startles them, attracts their notice, impresses them with the thought that they stand face to face with a superhuman power. On the other hand, the outside world of listeners, common men, or unbelievers, are likely to look on it as indicating madness (1 Corinthians 14:23). If it was not right or expedient to check the utterance of the tongues altogether, St. Paul at least thought it necessary to prescribe rules for its exercise which naturally tended to throw it into the background as compared with prophecy (1 Corinthians 14:27–28).

The conclusion from the whole chapter is, accordingly, that the “tongues” were not the power of speaking in a language which had not been learnt by the common ways of learning, but the ecstatic utterance of rapturous devotion.

As regards the terms which are used to describe the gift, the English reader must be reminded that the word “unknown” is an interpolation which appears for the first time in the version of 1611. Wiclif, Tyndale, Cranmer, and the Rhemish give no adjective, and the Geneva inserts “strange.”

It may be noted further that the Greek word for “tongue” had come to be used by Greek writers on Rhetoric for bold, poetic, unusual terms, such as belonged to epic poetry (Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.3), not for those which belonged to a foreign language. If they were, as Aristotle calls them, “unknown,” it was because they were used in a startlingly figurative sense, so that men were sometimes puzzled by them (Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.10). We have this sense of the old word (glossa) surviving in our glossary, a collection of such terms.

It is clear:

1. That such a use of the word would be natural in writers trained as St. Paul and St. Luke had been in the language of Greek schools; and
2. That it exactly falls in with the conclusion to which the phenomena of the case leads us, apart from the word.

We turn to the history that follows in this chapter, and we find almost identical phenomena:

1. The work of teaching is not done by the gift of tongues, but by the speech of Peter, and that was delivered either in the Aramaic of Palestine, or, more probably, in the Greek, which was the common medium of intercourse for all the Eastern subjects of the Roman empire. In that speech we find the exercise of the higher gift of prophecy, with precisely the same results as those described by St. Paul as following on the use of that gift (Compare Acts 2:37 with 1 Corinthians 14:24–25).
2. The utterances of the disciples are described in words which convey the idea of rapturous praise. They speak the mighty works, or better, as in Luke 1:49, the great things of God. Doxologies, benedictions, adoration, in forms that transcended the common level of speech, and rose, like the Magnificat, into the region of poetry: this is what the word suggests to us. In the wild, half dithyrambic hymn of Clement of Alexandria—the earliest extant Christian hymn outside the New Testament—in part, perhaps, in that of Acts 4:24-30, and the Apocalyptic hymns (Revelation 4:8; Revelation 4:11; Revelation 5:13; Revelation 7:10), we have the nearest approach to what then came, in the fiery glow of its first utterance, as with the tongues of men and of angels, from the lips of the disciples.
3. We cannot fail to be struck with the parallelism between the cry of the scoffers here, These men are full of new wine (Acts 2:13), and the words, Will they not say that you are mad? which St. Paul puts into the mouth of those who heard the “tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:23). In both cases there is an intensity of stimulated life, which finds relief in the forms of poetry and in the tones of song, and which to those who listened was as the poet’s frenzy. It is not without significance that St. Paul elsewhere contrasts “being drunk with wine” with “being filled with the Spirit,” and immediately passes on, as though that were the natural result, to add speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs (Ephesians 5:18–19).

If we find the old Jewish psalms in the first of these three words, and hymns known and remembered in the second, the natural explanation of the adjective specially alluded to in the third is that the “songs” or “odes” are such as were not merely “spiritual” in the later sense of the word, but were the immediate outflow of the Spirit’s working. Every analogy, it will be noticed, by which St. Paul illustrates his meaning in 1 Corinthians 13:1 and 1 Corinthians 14:7–8, implies musical intonation. We have the sounding brass and the tinkling (or clanging) cymbal, the pipe, the harp, the trumpet giving an uncertain sound.

It falls in with this view that our Lord Himself compares the new energy of spiritual life which He was about to impart to new wine (Matthew 9:17), and that the same comparison meets us in the Old Testament in the words in which Elihu describes his inspiration (Job 32:19). The accounts of prophecy in its wider sense, as including song and praise, as well as a direct message to the minds and hearts of men, in the life of Saul, present Phenomena that are obviously analogous (1 Samuel 10:10–11; 1 Samuel 19:20; 1 Samuel 19:24). The brief accounts in Acts 10:46, speaking with tongues and magnifying God, and Acts 19:6, where tongues are distinguished from prophecy, present nothing that is not in harmony with this explanation.

In the present case, however, there are exceptional phenomena. We cannot honestly interpret St. Luke’s record without assuming either that the disciples spoke in the languages which are named in Acts 2:9-11, or that, speaking in their own Galilean tongue, their words came to the ears of those who listened as spoken in the language with which each was familiar.

The first is at once the more natural interpretation of the language used by the historian, and, if we may use such a word of what is in itself supernatural and mysterious, the more conceivable of the two.

And it is clear that there was an end to be attained by such an extension of the gift in this case which could not be attained otherwise. The disciples had been present in Jerusalem at many feasts before, at which they had found themselves, as now, surrounded by pilgrims from many distant lands. Then they had worshipped apart by themselves, with no outward means of fellowship with these strangers, and had poured out their praises and blessings in their own Galilean speech, as each group of those pilgrims had done in theirs. Now they found themselves able to burst through the bounds that had thus divided them, and to claim a fellowship with all true worshippers from whatever lands they came.

But there is no evidence that that power was permanent. It came and went with the special outpouring of the Spirit, and lasted only while that lasted in its full intensity (Acts 19:6).

There are no traces of its exercise in any narrative of the work of apostles and evangelists. They did their work in countries where Greek was spoken, even where it was not the native speech of the inhabitants, and so would not need that special knowledge. In the history of Acts 14:11, it is at least implied that Paul and Barnabas did not understand the speech of Lycaonia.

There were dwelling at Jerusalem.—The phrase is one of frequent occurrence in St. Luke’s writings (Luke 13:4; Acts 1:19; Acts 4:16). As a word, it implied a more settled residence than the “sojourning” of Luke 24:18 (see Note) and Hebrews 11:9, but was probably sufficiently wide in its range to include the worshippers who had come up to keep the feast.

Devout men.—For the meaning of the word, see Note on Luke 2:25. The primary meaning was one of cautious reverence, the temper that handles sacred things devoutly. As such, it was probably used to include proselytes as well as Jews by birth. The words that are added, from every nation under heaven, reduce the probability to a certainty. It appears again in Acts 8:2.