Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 2:1

"And when the day of Pentecost was now come, they were all together in one place." — Acts 2:1 (ASV)

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 as Pentecost, which was celebrated on the fiftieth day after Passover (Leviticus 23:15–16). It was originally the Festival of the Firstfruits of the grain harvest (Exodus 23:16; Leviticus 23:17–22; Numbers 28:26–31); 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.

By the time of the first century A. D., however, it was considered the anniversary of the giving of the law at Mount Sinai and was a time for the annual renewal of the Mosaic covenant; it was therefore looked upon as one of the three great pilgrim festivals of Judaism (along with Passover and Tabernacles). Now no one who had been a companion of the apostle Paul 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; namely, 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 also shows that the mission of the Christian church, as was the ministry of Jesus, is dependent upon 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 Christcentered 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”; all he tells us about “where” is that “they were all together in one place,” in a “house” (v.2.). Most likely Luke is referring to the same upper room as in 1:12–26 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.