A brother asks about the meaning of Acts 10:47, “Can any man forbid water, that these should not be baptized, which have received the Holy Ghost as well as we?” The primary element involved in Christian baptism, water, is mentioned to represent the entirety of the process of baptism. Acts chapters Ten and Eleven record the taking of the Gospel message to the Gentile world as it was presented to Cornelius and those who gathered with him. The Jews had a longstanding bias toward everyone who was not Jewish (e.g., Samaritans, Gentiles). Jewish converts to Christianity brought with them this heightened prejudice against non-Jews. Only the remarkable incidents that happened to Peter in Joppa and then in Caesarea convinced, first Peter and then the six Jewish Christians who accompanied Peter, that the Gentiles also were intended by God to be the recipients of the Gospel message with its attendant blessings, including membership in the Lord’s church. Peter, at one point later, failed to distance himself from this bias against Gentiles (Galatians 2:11-14). Judaizing Christians also preached a distorted Gospel respecting Gentile admission to the church, which crisis was largely resolved by the apostles in Jerusalem (Acts 15).
Peter asked the six Jewish brethren who accompanied him, that in view of the obvious stamp of divine approval on the Gentiles’ reception of the Gospel message (evidenced by the bestowal of miraculous powers directly from heaven on those Gentiles), how could they do anything but proceed to baptize those Gentiles. It was a rhetorical question, the answer to which was, “We cannot, we dare not, resist the expressed intent of the Holy Spirit; we must baptize these Gentiles.”
Many erroneously suppose that Peter’s mention of the “Holy Ghost” here, where he assigns its prior reception to himself and the six Jewish brethren with him, is a reference to the baptism of the Holy Spirit of Acts Two. The promise of the baptism of the Holy Spirit was promised exclusively to the apostles of Christ (John 14-16; Acts 1:8) and received exclusively by the apostles in Acts Two (Acts 1:26-2:4). However, what Peter as well as the six Jewish Christians who accompanied Peter had received in common was the ability to perform miracles, most notably speaking in languages in which they had not been schooled (“tongues”). From the text, it is not certain (though probable) that each of the Jewish Christians with Peter could perform miracles. The real comparison Peter was making was that the Jews and now the Gentiles also (the two groups of humanity from the Jewish perspective) was both the recipient of miraculous gifts. That fact signified God’s intention that both Jews and Gentiles were intended by God to share the blessings of the Gospel and membership in the Lord’s church (Ephesians 2:11-22).
The miraculous bestowal of gifts to Cornelius and those with him could not have been alternatively bestowed by an apostle, such as Peter. The apostles were subject to the same Jewish biases of their countrymen. Besides, in the face of widespread resistance to the inclusion of the Gentiles in the church, the testimony of the Godhead through the direct bestowal of gifts and the implied stamp of approval, definitively settled the Gentile question in the minds of those who hearkened to God. The direct bestowal of miraculous gifts on Cornelius and those gathered with him is immaterial to and not directly related to the baptism of the Holy Spirit promised to and received by the apostles exclusively.
