Acts 2:13

ἕτεροι δὲ : although the word is ἕτεροι, not ἄλλοι, it is doubtful how far it indicates a distinct class from those mentioned as speaking in Acts 2:7-12. At the same time not only πάντες, Acts 2:12, but also the behaviour of the ἕτεροι, seems to separate them from the εὐλαβεῖς in Acts 2:5. χλευάζοντες : but stronger with the intensifying διά than the simple verb in Acts 17:32; used in classical Greek, Dem., Plato, and in Polybius here only in N.T., not found in LXX, although the simple verb is used (see below). γλεύκους : if the rendering R.V. “new wine” is adopted, the ridicule was indeed ill-timed, as at the Pentecost there was no new wine strictly speaking, the earliest vintage being in August (cf. Chrysostom and Oecumenius, who see in such a charge the excessive folly and the excessive malignity of the scoffers). Neither the context nor the use of the word elsewhere obliges us to suppose that it is used here of unfermented wine. Its use in Lucian, Ep., Sat., xxii. (to which reference is made by Wendt and Page), and also in LXX, Job 32:19, ὥσπερ ἀσκὸς γλεύκους ζέων δεδεμένος, points to a wine still fermenting, intoxicating, while the definition of Hesychius, τὸ ἀπόσταγμα τῆς σταφυλῆς πρὶν πατηθῇ, refers its lusciousness to the quality of its make (from the purest juice of the grape), and not of necessity to the brevity of its age, see B.D. “Wine”. It would therefore be best to render “sweet wine,” made perhaps of a specially sweet small grape, cf. Genesis 49:11. “The extraordinary candour of Christ's biographers must not be forgotten. Notice also such sentences as ‘but some doubted,' and in the account of Pentecost, ‘these men are full of new wine'. Such observations are wonderfully true to human nature, but no less wonderfully opposed to any ‘accretion' theory”: Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, p. 156.