Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 8:15

"who, when they were come down, prayed for them, that they might receive the Holy Spirit:" — Acts 8:15 (ASV)

When Peter and John arrived, they prayed for the Samaritan converts, laid their hands on them, and “they received the Holy Spirit.” Before this, Luke tells us, “The Holy Spirit had not yet come upon any of them; they had simply been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus.” We are not told just how the coming of the Holy Spirit upon these new converts was expressed in their lives, but the context suggests that his presence was attended by such external signs as marked his coming on the earliest Christians at Pentecost—probably by some form of glossolalia. On the temporal separation of the baptism of the Spirit from commitment to Jesus and water baptism, see comment on 2:38. In effect, in this first advance of the Gospel outside the confines of Jerusalem, God worked in ways that were conducive not only to the reception of the Good News in Samaria but also to the acceptance of these new converts by believers at Jerusalem.