KelbyofGod -
People in the bible could TELL when someone received the Holy Ghost... not because they started living a better life or stopped cussing (those things take a considerable amount of time to manifest).... it was because they started speaking in tongues. And that observable evidence often came right as they were laying their hands on them, praying for them to receive it. Or even while they were still preaching (think Cornelius in Acts 10 and again it was observable to those who stood by).
With respect to Cornelius, I’m going to paraphrase (and in a few places quote) from the book “Tongues Revisited – a Third Way” in which the author devotes a section which addresses just this subject.
Given that Cornelius commanded a unit known as the “Italian Regiment”, one may surmise that he was from Italy (Latin, “Italia”). The people he called together were his relatives and close friends – essentially a group of Romans; speakers of Latin and Greek, and possibly at least a working knowledge of Aramaic (due to their military postings).
In short, they were a multi-lingual group. We know they were at least bi-lingual as they spoke to Peter with no reported language difficulty. The passage is silent as to what language they conversed in, but as was the practice in the day when speakers of two different languages (in this case, Latin and Aramaic) tried to communicate with each other, the common language of choice was Greek (just as it would be English in today’s world – a German and Japanese get together and the language they’ll most likely use to communicate to each other in is English).
So, in short, we have some Latin and Greek speaking Romans meeting some Christian Jews (Aramaic and Greek speakers). From the narrative, we know that the incident is reported from the perspective of Peter and his peeps. “They heard them speaking in languages (“tongues”) and praising God”.
From this, we can deduce that Peter and his group heard two types of speech here: (1) speech that they understood, and (2) speech they did not understand.
Considering they knew that some of what was said were praises to God, those must have been said in a language they knew. Some of what was said however, they did not understand because it was foreign to them. They did not speak that language.
A direct quote – “Is praise of God, that is, saying in some way how marvelous God is, evidence for the presence of the Holy Spirit? If backed up by a true understanding of and commitment to God and his work, then I would say it is indeed an indication of the residence in that person of the Holy Spirit. It is to be expected that a new believer will praise the Lord in some way, and these people had just minutes previously become believers in Christ! Cornelius and his family were devout and God-fearing (Acts 10:2, 22). They had accepted the revelation of God that they knew of up to that point, but they were not saved (Acts 11:14). They had become Jewish proselytes, Gentiles who had adopted the faith of the Jews. This was in spite of the disdain in which they were held by ethnic Jews (Acts 10:28) even while they were respected by them (Acts 10:22).”
The likely scenario was that Peter and his friends entered Cornelius’s house and Peter addressed the gathered group, telling them about Jesus, his life, resurrection, etc. Cornelius and his friends responded to what they heard as a reaffirmation of what they already believed. Reacting joyously, some of them addressed the Lord directly in their mother-tongue (i.e. Latin, a language Peter and his friends apparently did not speak), or turned to their friends and discussed these tremendous things with them (again in Latin).
To quote directly again - “Some of them, perhaps for the benefit of Peter and his friends, addressed the Lord, or talked among themselves in their shared language, Aramaic or, more likely, Greek. They were filled with the wonder and joy of having received 'life through repentance' (Acts 11:18). It was very evident to Peter and the others that here were truly converted people. It is so reminiscent of Acts 2; the multilingual situation and the praise of the wonders of God, though in this case it was from newly converted people. Another difference also was that here there were no cultural 'high language/low language' conventions to break (with Acts 2, the high language was Hebrew; the low languages were Aramaic and Greek). These people were simply thrilled that they were saved, and told the Lord so. This is quite sufficient to have prompted Peter's comment, "The Holy Spirit came on them as he came on us at the beginning." “
So, no modern T-speech here, just plain old real languages. In this case here the foreign language (“tongue”) was Latin; a language Peter and his friends apparently did not know. These apostles were among the non-Jews (read, non-Aramaic speaking people) the apostles preached to; thus, any native language these people spoke (with the exception of Greek) would have been considered a “tongue”.
Where are there other examples of this occurring – your comment seemed to indicate more than one occurrence(?).
