It,
οἶκον ἄρτον, µετελάμβανον τροφῆς ἐν ἀγαλλιάσει καὶ ἀφελότητι καρδίας, 47. αἰνοῦντες τὸν Θεὸν καὶ ἔχοντες χάριν πρὸς Sov τὸν
ii. 13, 20, xix. 37, Acts iii. 8, 9, else- where only in Rom. xv. 11 (a quotation), and Rev. xix. 5, with dative of person, W.H. The praise refers not merely to their thanksgivings at meals, but is characteristic of their whole devotional life both in public and private; and their life of worship and praise, combined with their liberality and their simplicity of life, helped to secure for them the result given in the following words, and an un- molested hearing inthe Temple ‘‘ Hunc inveniunt (favorem) qui Deum laudant ” Bengel. aivéw is very frequent in the LXX, and nearly always of the praise of God, but cf. Gen. xlix. 8, Prov. Xxxi. 28, 30, 31, Ecclus. xliv. 1, ete.— ἔχοντες χάριν: if the life of the Church at this stage has been compared with that of her divine Master, inasmuch as it increased in wisdom and stature, another point of likeness may be found in the fact that the Church, like Christ, was in favour with God and man.—xdpw: very frequent in St. Luke’s Gospel and the Acts (Friedrich), only three times in the Gospel of St. John, and not at all in St. Matthew or St. Mark. Inthe Ο.Τ. it is often used of finding favour in the sight of God, and in the N.T. in a similar sense, cf. Luke i. 30, Acts vii. 46. It is also used in the O.T. of favour, kind- ness, goodwill, especially from a superior to an inferior (Gen. xviii. 3, Xxxli. 5, etc.), so too in the Ν.Τ., here, and in Acts vii. 10. See further note on Acts xiv. 3. In Luke’s Gospel eight times, in Acts seventeen times. See also Plum- mer’s full note on Luke iv. 22, Sanday and Headlam’s Romans, p. 10, and Grimm-Thayer, sub v. Rendall would render ‘‘ giving Him thanks before all the people,” and he refers to the fact that the phrase is always so rendered elsewhere (though once wrongly trans- lated, Heb xii. 28). But the phrase is also found in LXX, Exodus xxxiii. 12, 1 Esdras vi. 5 (see also Wetstein, in loco) in the sense first mentioned.—é δὲ κύριος προσετίθει, {.ε., the Lord Christ, cof. ver. 36 (as Holtzmann, Wendt, Weiss, amongst others). The pure and simple life of the disciples doubtless commended them to the people, and made it easier for them to gain con- fidence, and so converts, but the growth of the Church, St. Luke reminds us, was not the work of any human agency or attractiveness.—rovs σωζοµένους: natur-
ally connected with the prophecy in ver. 21 (cf. v. 40), so that the work of salva- tion there attributed to Jehovah by the Old Testament Prophet is here the work of Christ the inference is again plain with regard to our Lord’s divinity. The expression is .rightly translated in R.V. (so too in i Cor. i. 18, 2 Cor. ii. 15. See Burton, Moods and Tenses in Ν. T. Greek, pp. 57, 58). It has nothing to do, as Wetstein well remarks, with the secret counsels of God, but relates to those who were obeying St. Peter’s com- mand in ver. 4ο. An apt parallelis given by Mr. Page from Thuc., vii., 44.
Gift of Tongues, ii. 4. λαλεῖν ἑτέραις yA@ooats.—There can be no doubt that St. Luke’s phrase (cf. γλώσσαις καιναῖς, Mark xvi. 17, W.H., margin, not text), taken with the context, distinctly asserts that the Apostles, if not the whole Christian assembly (St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, including the hundred-and-twenty), received the power of speaking in foreign languages, and that some of their hearers at all events understood them, vv. 8, I1 (ἡμετέραις). (On the phrase as distinguished from those used elsewhere in Acts and in 1 Cor., see Grimm-Thayer, sub v., γλῶττα 2, and Blass, Acta Apost., p. 50, ‘“‘yA@rra etiam ap. att. per se est lingua peregrina vel potius vocabulum Ῥετε- grinum”’.) Wendt and Matthias, who have recently given us a lengthy account of the events of the first Christian Pente- cost, both hold that this speaking with tongues is introduced by St. Luke him- self, and that it is a legendary embel- lishment from his hand of what actually took place; the speaking with tongues at Pentecost was simply identical with the same phenomenon described else- where in x. 46, xix. 6, and in 1 Cor. xii.- xiv. This is plain from St. Peter’s own words in xi. 15, 17; SO in xix. 6, the speaking with tongues is the immediate result of the outpouring of the Spirit. So too’ Wendt lays stress upon the fact that St. Paul says λαλεῖν γλώσσαις or γλώσσῃ, but not Aad. ἑτέρ. yA. The former was evidently the original mode of describing the phenomenon, to which Luke recurs in his own description in x. 46 and xix. 6, whereas in the passage before us his language represents the miraculous enhancement of the events οί Pentecost. M‘Giffert, in the same way, thinks that the writer of Acts, far re-