Jesus of Nazareth: What He Wanted, Who He Was

During Jesus’ lifetime the Twelve were an institutionalized sign of Jesus’ focus on the whole of Israel. He made them the official witnesses of his message and the personal symbol of the claims of the reign of God on the whole people of the twelve tribes. That was already a clearly eschatological function, one whose symbolic language was irrevocably linked to the number twelve. If the eschatological-symbolic function of the Twelve with respect to Israel continued after the death of Jesus—and the appearances of the Risen One must certainly have suggested that—then the group of the Twelve had to be augmented and made complete again precisely because of the approaching end-time events. Only in the number twelve was the sign visible, and only in the full power of the sign could the Twelve be witnesses for the Son of Man to Israel at the immediately approaching last judgment.

This offers the simplest explanation for why the group of the Twelve, though quickly restored to its full complement after Jesus’ death, was not further augmented in later years: the first and only election took place in that particular historical phase of the earliest community when the disciples’ expectations of the end had reached their highest degree of intensity. Again it proves to be a valid principle to regard the movements and activities within the earliest community entirely from the point of view of their highly expectant consciousness of the end time.

The Pentecost Event

This interpretive key applies also to the event that took place at the Jewish Feast of Weeks in Jerusalem. Luke tells of it immediately after he has recounted the choice of Matthias:

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. (Acts 2:1-4)

This narrative and its continuation make up a text that already had a long history of tradition behind it, in the course of which it had been changed and brought up to date; it was then reworked again and expanded by Luke himself. Let us for the moment set aside the motifs of wind and fire. They are part of an older, pre-Lukan layer of tradition that told of miraculous speech and whose model lay in Jewish interpretations of the Sinai story. God gave his Law on Sinai in fire and loud thunder, and despite all their different languages all the peoples of the world could understand what God spoke on Sinai.¹⁶

The earliest level of the narrative, however, was not about a miracle of speech but about the phenomenon of “speaking in tongues,” or glossolalia. The final text says that they spoke “in other tongues,” that is, in foreign languages, but behind that is an original lalein glōssais, a “speaking in tongues,” namely, inarticulate, ecstatic speech.¹⁷ We can take it as certain that the oldest narrative core of Acts 2:1-36 told of the outbreak of ecstatic praise of God in inarticulate speech within the original Jerusalem community.

In that case, however, we can imagine the whole context as follows: Peter, the Twelve, and other disciples returned to Jerusalem, at the latest for the Feast of Weeks. They were still in the thrall of their visions of the Risen One and the impressions from what they had heard about the empty tomb. They arrived in a high-strung state of eschatological expectation, looking for the Parousia, the final, ultimate appearance of the Risen One, to take place publicly in the capital city itself.

They joined with the disciples, male and female, who had remained in the city. All of them gathered to exchange experiences and pray (cf. Acts 1:13-14), and then, on the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), in the midst of such a gathering, there was an eruption of ecstatic speech that seized them all and shook them to the core. This prayer experience left them with a deep faith conviction. It formed the group of Jesus followers definitively into a community and—this is crucial—it was interpreted by the community as an experience of the Spirit. This was the beginning of such experiences of the Spirit in the church. There have again and again been glossolalic phenomena since then. In the course of the later mission they extended to other communities (cf. Acts 10:46; 19:6). Even twenty years later we find them in Corinth. It was probably at the same time, and in connection with the speaking in tongues, that the charism of prophecy appeared in the earliest community (cf. Acts 11:27), and it would accompany the development of communities for a long time.