Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Twelve men who had not heard of the Spirit
Acts 19:1-7
1 While Apollos was at Corinth, Paul, having passed through the upper country, came to Ephesus and found certain disciples. · WEB
Paul finds believers whose information stops before Pentecost, and the one recorded rebaptism in Scripture is the remedy.
At Ephesus Paul finds certain disciples, and something about them prompts an immediate question: Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? He asks it before anything else, which suggests that whatever a Spirit-filled congregation looked like, this group did not look like one.
Their answer is startling. No, we haven't even heard that there is a Holy Spirit. Since every Jew who heard the prophets read knew of the Spirit of God, the sense must be narrower — they had not heard that he had been given. Their information ends before Pentecost.
Paul's follow-up goes to the root: Into what then were you baptized? He treats a person's baptism as the record of what they were taught, and the answer confirms the diagnosis: Into John's baptism. These men are in the same condition Apollos was in a few verses earlier, and probably from the same source.
The correction is a single sentence of doctrine. John indeed baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying to the people that they should believe in the one who would come after him. John's baptism was never an end. It was a preparation pointing forward, and its own preacher said so. Men who have stopped at it have stopped in the middle of a sentence John himself finished.
They are then baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and this is the only rebaptism recorded in Scripture. The narrowness of the case is the whole point of it. Nothing here suggests a defective experience, or a lapse, or a later doubt about a baptism validly received. What is corrected is a baptism into an expectation whose object had already come — an incomplete message, not an inadequate believer. A rite performed toward a promise is repeated once the promise has been kept.
Then Paul lays hands on them, the Spirit comes, and they speak with other languages and prophesy. The signs match Pentecost and Caesarea, and the reason is the same in each case: a group whose standing was in question receives, visibly, exactly what the others received.
They were about twelve men in all. The number is given with an approximation attached, which is the kind of detail an inventor does not supply. And it is a small group. The church at Ephesus, which would become the most influential Paul founded, begins with a dozen men who had the story only up to the wrong point and were glad to be told the rest.
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