Jewish Pentecost was reckoned from the 16th Nisan. Fifty days after the celebration of the first-fruit, on the 6th Sivan, our May, two barley loaves and two lambs were dedicated as a thankoffering to God, followed by sin-offerings and festive meals. Thus the beginning of the harvest and the end of it were celebrated in connection with religious observances. Up to our times it is customary for pious and mystic Jews to meet on the day of the Jewish and of the Christian Passover for the purpose of reciting prayers of a mystic tendency. Considering the sanctity of the Jewish Pentecost, we have a right to assume that during the apostolic age such Jews who, like the Essenes, had been brought up in a figurative and typical interpretation of Scripture, regarded that day as a divinely instituted type of Messianic events.

Such allegorizing Jews, whether Essenes or not, would year after year, on the day of the Pentecost, assemble in one place, united by a common expectation that the promises made by prophets to Israel would be fulfilled about a new covenant, and about the peaceful union between Jews and Gentiles. which the coming Elias was to bring about. As after the night-watch preceding the 16th Nisan they had yearly looked forward to the antitype of the firstfruits, so on the 6th Sivan they may have expected some miracle showing the typical importance of the two barley loaves and the two lambs commanded to be offered on that day.

It could therefore be easily believed that the twelve apostles assembled, being of one mind, when

the yearly day of the Pentecost was about to be accomplished. They had a special reason for then expecting the fulfilment of what had been typified by the Jewish Pentecost. For if the types of the Paschal lamb and of the first-fruits had been fulfilled by the death and by the resurrection of Christ, as Paul had taught, then it could be expected that the fiftieth day after the celebration of the first-fruit, by a miracle, would be declared as the antitype of the yearly Pentecost. To remove from the apostles every possible doubt that an important miracle would take place on that very day of Pentecost, that then would be fulfilled all which had been typified by this annual celebration, the risen Jesus is said to have appeared among them, as he had done during the preceding forty days previous to his ascension. He announced to them that they would receive after not many days "the promise of the Father," that is, the outpouring of the Spirit, the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which was now announced as having been by John the Baptist rightly designated as future only. The disciples, so we are told, had heard from Jesus about the fulfilment of the Father's promise; but it was new to them that not many days after their Master's ascension they would be baptized with the Holy Spirit. Under these circumstances they must have felt convinced that this event would take place on the tenth day after the ascension, on the day of Pentecost.

And so indeed it happened, marvellous to relate ! With their carnal ears they heard that "suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing

mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting." With their carnal eyes they saw appearing unto them "tongues parting asunder like as of fire, and one sat on every one among them, and they all became full of the Holy Spirit, and began to talk in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."

If Paul's doctrine of the coming of the promised Spirit after the death of Jesus was supposed to require some authoritative support beyond this apostle's mere assertion, nothing could be more conclusive, or better calculated to dispel any doubts on the subject, than the assertion that the risen Christ himself had in so far altered the doctrine he proclaimed before his death that, instead of the presence of the Holy Spirit, he had announced the future coming of the same. It was said that he commanded his disciples, instead of going to Galilee, not to depart from Jerusalem, there "to wait for the promise of the Father, which, said he, ye have heard from me." Thus the doctrine of Paul was confirmed, that "the Spirit of promise" did not come till after the death of Jesus. Paul must have referred in his epistles to so welcome a tradition if he had known anything about it. For it removed the partition-wall between the principal doctrine of Jesus and those of himself. If such a tradition had in his time been afloat, and held as reliable, it would have shown that the apostles had no reason to be afraid of him, not to believe that he was a disciple, and not to give him for fourteen years the right hand of fellowship.

Above all, Paul must have referred to the Pentecostal miracle if it had taken place, because it would have been the best answer to the chief objection of his unsparing opponents in Galatia and in other churches respecting his apostleship; for such a recognition would have been impossible in consequence of his not having received the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost together with the twelve apostles. Against such a charge, if it had ever been made, Paul would have defended himself in his epistles. Not only do they not refer to the Pentecostal miracle, but Paul's doctrine about the manifestations of the Spirit is in direct contradiction to what is asserted to have been the outward manifestation of the same on the day of Pentecost. Instead of admitting so exceptional a manifestation of the Spirit, Paul declares that God revealed to him and others, "through the Spirit," the "things which eye saw not and ear heard not, and which entered not in the heart of man, whatsoever things God prepared for them that love him."1

Whether in the apostolic age or in the second century, sooner or later the Paulinic party felt the necessity and had the required power to invent and to attribute to Luke the theory of the Pentecostal miracle, of which Paul certainly can have known nothing. The three reported miracles, the two in the month of Nisan and the one in the month of Sivan, have never taken place.

1 I Cor. ii. 9.

RESULT.

Stephen and Paul were the first to apply to Jesus Christ the Oriental-Essenic doctrine of the Angel-Messiah. Paul became converted to the faith of Stephen, for which reason the disciples at Jerusalem, therefore also the apostles, were afraid of him, and believed not that he was a disciple. Together with the doctrine of the incarnate angel of the Lord who went before and followed Israel in the wilderness, Paul has applied to Jesus the doctrine of his pre-mundane personal existence, by identifying him with the eternal Wisdom of God, as the same is described in the Book of Proverbs. Paul describes Jesus Christ as the Wisdom of God, "through' through" whom are all things, as the Word of God come down from heaven, the man from heaven, the second Adam. Before his incarnation in Jesus, the eternal Christ had a divine form, he laid aside this divine. person, he disembodied himself, and took upon him a human form; he was born of a woman, and put under the Law.

After Paul's doctrine, Christ died on the cross as the antitype of the l'aschal lamb, the first slaying of which in Egypt he himself, the angel of God, had ordered to Moses, as the text implies. That angel forgave transgressions, and through the blood of the lamb he brought about an immediate liberation, the type of a future redemption. Beyond the command to slay the Paschal lamb as "the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover," the angel