Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 19:3

"And he said, Into what then were ye baptized? And they said, Into John`s baptism." — Acts 19:3 (ASV)

The question Paul put to the twelve, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed,” suggests two things: (1) that he assumed they were truly Christians, since they professed to believe; and (2) that he held that true faith and the reception of the Holy Spirit always went together. These two assumptions caused Paul some difficulty when he met these twelve men, for something in their life indicated that one or the other assumption was wrong. When they answered his question by saying, “We have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit,” he knew the second assumption was not in error. So he asked further about the first one and found that they claimed to have been baptized only with “John’s baptism.” The account is extremely difficult to interpret, principally because it is so brief. Probably these twelve men thought of John the Baptist as the height of God’s revelation—perhaps even as the Messiah himself (cf. Jn 1:19-34; 2:22– 36, which counters such thinking). Presumably a John-the-Baptist sect existed within Jewish Christian circles in Asia in the first century (cf. Ephesians 4:5). As in any such group, some (such as Apollos) would have appreciated John the Baptist and yet looked forward to the greater fulfillment of which he spoke; others (such as the twelve men here whom Paul met in Ephesus) would have stayed in their devotion to the Baptist himself without any real commitment to Jesus.