(1) And it came to pass, that, while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul having passed through the upper coasts came to Ephesus: and finding certain disciples, (2) He said unto them, Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed? And they said unto him, We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. (3) And he said unto them, Unto what then were ye baptized? And they said, Unto John's baptism. (4) Then said Paul, John verily baptized with the baptism of repentance, saying unto the people, that they should believe on him which should come after him, that is, on Christ Jesus. (5) When they heard this, they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. (6) And when Paul had laid his hands upon them, the Holy Ghost came on them; and they spake with tongues, and prophesied. And all the men were about twelve.

The Questions:
Were these twelve men reimmersed?
If so, why?

Discussions on these questions have come down to us from the sixteenth century, and, strange to say, both Baptists and Pedobaptists have advocated both sides of the questions in the last three hundred years. When Protestants, in the sixteenth century, demanded of Baptists a scriptural warrant for rebaptizing, they confidently referred to this passage, claiming, at the same time, that they (Baptists) did not rebaptize, but simply baptized.

Calvin, the father and founder of Presbyterianism, gave himself no rest until he had formulated an exegesis of the passage that would rob Baptists of its authority in the support of their practice. He did this by a specious misconstruction of the pronouns "they" in the fourth and fifth verses, claiming "they" referred to the people to whom John is said to have preached in the fourth verse.

Because this record has been in dispute for over three hundred years by the best scholars in those centuries, are we justified in saying that it can not be undoubtedly understood if the rules of interpretation governing the construction of the Greek language be observed? or to say that the Holy Spirit did not intend it to be undoubtedly understood!

What is this but blaspheming the Holy Spirit? The Holy Spirit claims this part of the New Testament to be an infallible revelation of the acts of the apostles; and yet He formulates a record, designedly selecting words so hopelessly ambiguous, and formulating them in sentences so contrary to the rules governing the interpretation of the language used, that the best scholars of the age, to say nothing of the commonly intelligent, can undoubtedly ascertain what is meant. Who will say that this is not blaspheming the Holy Spirit? Indeed, it is of the most gross and impious sort.

Although Baptists in Calvin's day unhesitatingly rejected his exegesis of this passage as incorrect, yet, in the century following, when the discussions on the act and subjects of baptism raged fierce and hot, and the Baptists urged the authority of John's baptism and ministry with irresistible force against the affusion of infants, Pedobaptists hedged them with the argument (?) that John's baptism was not a Christian ordinance, but a Jewish rite, used by John to induct Christ into His priestly office, and, therefore, no example for us, etc. Baptists met them with the authority of Calvin, one of their own poets, to prove the Christian character of John's baptism with his misconstruction of Acts xix, to save it from being discredited by Paul's refusing to repeat it in the case of the twelve disciples.

And this is the case to-day. All Pedobaptists and some Baptist who, strange to say, lay claim to scholarship, (!!) maintain, on grammatical grounds, that these twelve were not reimmersed!

And, yet, how many professed Pedobaptists, and others taught by them, confidently say that the Holy Spirit designedly selected a word of generic signification when It described what John did to Christ when he baptized Him; so that His disciples in after ages could not certainly ascertain the specific act Christ observed and commanded His disciples to observe for baptism when he commanded them to baptize, or to be baptized; for, very few are so reckless as to say that Christ observed one act when He was baptized, and commanded His disciples to observe quite a different thing when He said follow me.

The interpretation of this passage turns upon the pronouns and their proper antecedents. Now there is no one principle in any language, touching pronouns, more axiomatic than this:

Pronouns should not be used instead of their antecedents, when their use would in the least obscure the sense of the passage in which they occur, much less when they make the passage doubtful or ambiguous.

Construing the passage by this rule, every English scholar is bound to decide that the pronoun "them" of the sixth verse, and "they" of the fifth, manifestly refer to disciples of the first for their antecedents. The narrative plainly declares that Paul laid his hands upon those who were baptized; but since he did not lay his hands upon those John baptized, he must have laid his hands upon these twelve disciples.

To say that the pronoun "them" of the sixth verse, and the pronoun "they" of the fifth, do not refer to the same antecedent, is to charge the inspired writer with using the pronoun so as not only to obscure, but to contradict the sense! The reason is obvious, for it is a simple continuous narrative, and there is nothing introduced to show that they refer to different antecedents, and therefore we are forced by the laws of language to refer them to one and the same antecedent.

The Greek does not only warrant this rendering, and the construction we have given, but it unquestionably demands it. Every Greek scholar knows that the conjunctive "but" has an adversative force, and is therefore used to call attention to the fact that the word or clause with which it stands, is to be distinguished from something preceding, while "and" is often used to resume the discourse after a long parenthesis; while the office of "and" is to continue the narration. Now, turning to the original, we may expect that the transition from the relation of Paul to that of Luke would be indicated by this adversative, de, that marks the change from Luke's narrative to Paul's, but instead of this, we find the kai introducing the fifth verse, and only the simple connective "and," introducing the sixth verse. Therefore, according to the use of these connectives in the Greek, we must conclude that Paul's narrative closes with the fifth verse, or the sixth would have been introduced with "but," and the fifth with "and."

[It is apparent that the latter paragraph contains textual errors which betray Graves' intents. His intended point apparently was that verse five begins with the adversative de whereas verse six begins with the connective kai. This is twofold indication that Paul's narrative ends with the fourth verse and Luke's narrative begins with the fifth. This follows first in that de indicates transition to a new speaker in the fifth verse, and second in that kai indicates the speaker of the sixth verse is the same as the fifth, but the speaker of the sixth is obviously Luke. - David Pyles]

Prof. Charles Anthon, (Pedobaptist), one of the most accomplished of American Greek scholars, says, "The word 'they' in verse five of xix Acts, refers clearly to the 'disciples' mentioned in the first of the chapter, and not to those who are spoken of in verse four as having been baptized by John. The particle de at the commencement of verse five, is employed to mark transition, and is not meant to be the correspondent particle to the 'men' of verse four. * * * Paul's narrative, therefore, closes with verse four. Any other view of the question is open to serious difficulties."

Not only do the particles above determine the question, but the regimen of the pronouns and particle, employed by the inspired historian.

It is not a verb in the Aorist tense, in the original, but a participle, and the conjunction, "but," that is rendered in our version, "And when they heard this." The literal rendering is, "but hearing this," etc. The participle akousantes in the nominative plural, can not refer to laoo which is in the dative singular, as its antecedent, but to autous, the representative of mathetas (disciples) in verse one. We think no Greek scholar will question this.

Then, again, the sixth verse being connected to the fifth, by the copulative conjunction "and," instead of a disjunctive, requires that autois (them), akousantes (hearing), should have the same antecedent - disciples. Thus does the original clearly demonstrate that these twelve disciples were rebaptized.

Albert Barnes (Presbyterian), of this says: "This is the obvious interpretation of the passage, which would strike all persons as correct unless there were some previous theory to support. The opposite is a most forced construction" (See his notes on Acts xix.)

Alexander Carson (Baptist), acknowledged by scholars to be the "Prince of Philologists," says: "I can not see how it can be denied without doing violence to God's Word" - i.e., that those disciples were baptized.

If these twelve disciples were reimmersed, as I claim to have demonstrated they were, then it must have been because there was an irregularity in their first baptism which rendered it void. There are four things essential to scriptural baptism:

1. A scriptural act.
2. A scriptural subject - i.e., regenerated.
3. A qualified administrator.
4. Design - i.e., for a scriptural purpose.

We are authorized to suppose that something connected with them awakened Paul's suspicion that all was not right with them; that, if they were what they professed to be, he desired to know "if they received the Holy Ghost when they believed." He therefore asks: "Did ye in believing receive the Holy Ghost?" For this is the form of the question in the original. They replied, "We did not so much as hear if there be a Holy Ghost." This frank disavowal of so much as any knowledge of such a person in the Trinity as the Holy Ghost, was well calculated to awaken Paul's surprise, and he very appropriately asks, "Into what then were ye baptized?" Into what faith could ye have been baptized? - what Christian evangelist could have taught and baptized you and you not so much as have heard of the existence of the Holy Spirit? And they answered: "Into John's baptism." They did not say, "We were baptized by John," as they unquestionably would have done had they received the act at his hands, in which case they certainly would have heard from him that there was a Holy Spirit. They understood that they had received and been baptized into the faith or doctrine that John preached, by some one of John's disciples doubtless, and, if so, he was not qualified to administer the act, and, never having heard of the Holy Spirit, or experienced its renewing influences, they themselves were not proper subjects for Christian baptism.

Here we have a conspicuous want of three of the essential elements of Christian baptism:

1. Qualified subjects: These were manifestly unregenerate; not having heard of the existence of the Holy Spirit, therefore, not having been the subjects of His regenerating influence.
2. They lacked a qualified administrator. They had not been baptized by John the Baptist himself since John closed his ministry, some twenty or twenty-five years before this.
3. If, by one of John's disciples, he was not authorized to administer John's baptism. John was not authorized to commission any one to administer his baptism. His baptism commenced and ended with his ministry. He was to decrease and therefore no one was to continue his ministry, nor was John authorized to commission any one of his disciples to baptize.

We learn (1) that though the subject profess his faith, and that most sincerely and conscientiously, and is satisfied with his baptism as those twelve men were, yet if his faith is not a scriptural faith, his baptism is a nullity.

We learn (2) that persons who, through misinstruction or misapprehension, have been immersed before they receive the renewing of the Holy Ghost, are most certainly entitled to receive Christian baptism when such have experienced satisfactory evidence of a change of heart. Receiving correct instruction they believed and were baptized, and, thus doing, they set an example for all who have received irregular baptisms to follow.

All can see that the immersion of these men does not reflect in the least upon John's baptism. They evidently were not baptized by John, but by some of John's disciples some twenty years after John's baptism ceased, and had long been superseded by the ministry of Christ.

We think the context clearly indicated by whom they were immersed.

Apollos, a Jew of Alexandria, a disciple of John, a zealous and eloquent man, knowing nothing but the baptism of John - labored about here mightily, convincing the Jews from the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ, but not with a perfect knowledge of what he should preach, for Aquila and Priscilla took him unto them, and expounded unto him the way of the Lord more perfectly, but a silence right here carries a convincing argument with it. It does not say they required him to be rebaptized, which they would have done if John's baptism had not been Christian and valid baptism. He, doubtless, received his baptism from John himself, but he could have received no authority to baptize others, for John had no right to give such authority. He is authority on this: I must decrease. In this age all such authority is vested in Churches of Christ. Their official ministers - ordained ministers - are their official servants.