99
6, 21. Certainly Heb. ii. 2-4 cannot, as Schmid well points out against Holtzmann, lead to any such con- nection of ideas as the μερισμοὶ πνεύμ. ay. are evidently the distribu- tion of the gifts of the Spirit. We may readily admit that the miracle on the birthday of the Christian Church was meant to foreshadow the universal progress of the new faith, and its message for all mankind without distinction of nation, position, or age. But even if the Jewish tradition referred to above was in existence at this early date, we have still to consider whether the narrative in Acts could possibly be a copy of it, or dependent upon it. According to the tradition, a voice was to be expected from Heaven which would be understood by different men in their mother tongues, but in our narrative the Apostles them- selves speak after the manner of men in these tongues. For to suppose that the Apostles all spoke one and the same language, but that the hearers were enabled to understand these utterances, each in his own language, is not only to do violence to the narrative, but simply to substitute one miraculous incident for another. Nor again, as Wendt further admits, is there any real ground for seeing in the miraculous event under consideration a cancelling of the con- fusion of tongues at Babel which resulted from rebellion against God, for the narra- tive does not contain any trace of the conception of a unity of language to which the Jewish idea appears to have tended as a contrast to the confusion of Babel (Test. xii., Patr., ¥ud., xxv.). The unity is not one of uniformity of speech but of oneness of Spirit and in the Spirit. At the same time there was a peculiar fitness in the fact that the first and most abundant bestowal of this divine gift should be given at a Feast which was marked above all others by the presence of strangers from distant lands, that a sign should thus be given to them that believed not, and that the firstfruits of a Gentile harvest should be offered by the Spirit to the Father (Iren., Adv. Haer, iii., 17), an assurance to the Apostles of the greatness and universality of the message which they were com- missioned to deliver. But there is no reason to suppose that this power of speaking in foreign languages was a per- manent gift. In the first place the Greek language was known throughout the Roman Empire, and in the next place Acts xiv. 11 (see im loco) seems to forbid any such view. The speaking