Acts 2:4

To speak with other tongues] We should not gather from the references to the gift of tongues in St. Paul (1 Corinthians 12-14) and in the appendix to St. Mark (Mark 16:17), that the gift in question was the power of speaking foreign languages. Nor do foreign languages appear to have been spoken when Cornelius and his companions spoke with tongues and magnified God (Acts 10:46), nor when the twelve men at Ephesus, upon whom St. Paul had laid hands, 'spake with tongues and prophesied' (Acts 19:6). Many, therefore, are of opinion—especially since St. Peter compares the case of Cornelius and his companions with the event at Pentecost (Acts 11:15)—that in this passage also the speaking with tongues is not to be understood as a speaking in foreign languages, but as some kind of ecstatic utterance of praise, not fully under the control of the speaker. This view is plausible, but difficult to reconcile with the primd facie meaning of the present passage. In Acts 2:6 it is said that the multitude were confounded, 'because that every man heard them speak in his own language.' Again in Acts 2:7 the multitude ask, 'Behold, are not all these which speak Galikeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born?' (see also Acts 2:11). The meaning surely must be that the disciples either spoke, or that they seemed to their hearers to speak, foreign languages. This being so, we are constrained to believe, either that St. Luke has misunderstood the nature of the event, or that this Pentecostal miracle was of a higher and more extraordinary character than the later 'speaking with tongues.' Among modern parallels the most suggestive is the case of St. Vincent Ferrer, who, when preaching in Spanish, is said to have been understood by English, Flemish, French, and Italian hearers (see further on 1 Corinthians 12-14). We may see in this event, which seemed to obliterate the barriers of nationality and language, a reversal of the separation and confusion of tongues (Genesis 11).