Pentecost

Here's a translation of Acts 2:1-13 and (not that anyone has to agree with them, but hopefully they will be helpful) a few words from Richard Pervo's new Hermeneia commentary:

On the day of Pentecost the entire group was together. A sudden noise from above, like the roar of a strong rushing wind, filled the house in which they were sitting. Phenomena resembling jagged fiery tongues appeared. One of these settled upon each person. All were filled with Holy Spirit and, all, directed by the Spirit to give utterance, began to speak in foreign tongues.

Among the residents of Jerusalem were devout persons from every country under the sun. In response to the noise a crowd flocked together, for each and every one of them heard these people speaking in their native languages. In absolute bewilderment they exclaimed: "Aren't all these people who are speaking Galileans?" How can it be that each of us is hearing our own language? There are Parthinans, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia, [__], Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Egypt, residents of Cyrenean Libya, visiting Roman citizens, Jews by birth and Jews by choice, Cretans and Arabs. Yet we are hearing these Galileans glorifying God in our own languages! Al were bewildered and perplexed, constantly asking one another, "What is going on?" Although there were some who made fun of the whole business by announcing, "They're full of cheap wine."

Pentecost may be the most exciting and least comprehensible episode in Acts. The story collapses at the slightest breeze. It begins with a group gathered in a house, perhaps for a devotion... These (12? 120?) persons experience a complicated epiphany that issues in inspired speech, possibly glossolalia (vv 1-4). Somehow this noise within a house becomes loud enough to attract a crowd evidently composed entirely of non-native residents who somehow pervieve that the speakers are from Galilee, although they hear neither ecstatic speech nor Palestinian Aramaic (which may have betrayed a Galilean origin to the experienced ear), but, to their utter amazement, a religious message in their respective native tongues (5-12). In a logical narrative, each would have heard (a group?) speaking Latin, Egyptian, or the like, leading to a conversation in which on e participant says to another, "Do you know what language that is?" It's Phrygian." To which another replies, "Oh no. that's the indigenous language of rural Cyrene," and so forth. The narrative telescopes such conversation, reporting that all spoke these words in unison, somehow grasping the precise distribution of the ethnic origins among them. Some could not determine what all this meant, but others were clear: "they're drunk" (v. 13). That charge would fit glossolalia, and Peter assumes that it is the opinion held by the entire audience (vv. 14-15). Most amazingly - and quite revelatory from the narrative perspective - nothing specific is said about the content of the message they heard.

This is a confusion worthy of babel. A redactional solution almost leaps from the page: Luke had a story about ecstatic speech that he transformed, either out of distaste for glossolia or to expound universalism, or both, into a linguistic miracle focusing on what was heard. This remedy recognizes the presence of conflicting elements and posits a likely source, but it is more of a description of the problem than an unraveling of it.