Did Pentecost really happen

Answer 1

Acts 2:1-4 tells how, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Ghost came down as tongues of fire on the heads of each of the disciples, and they began to speak in other languages.

This is somewhat inconsistent with John 20:22, which says that the disciples had already received the Holy Ghost from Jesus himself. The to this question may lie in the improbability of the disciples being given the Holy Ghost twice. More importantly, the strange fact of unschooled fishermen being able to speak fluently in various other languages would have attracted considerable interest and probably resulted in correspondence and records being written, but there is no evidence of this. There is no direct or indirect extra-biblical evidence for Pentecost.

So, if the only evidence for Pentecost is in Acts, we should ask how reliable this account really is. We know that Luke relied on Mark's Gospel for the source for his information on the life of Jesus, because whenever he agrees with Mark, the Greek text is almost identical, and because the "Missing Block" exposes his complete lack of knowledge of events recorded in Mark. We can also say that Acts was written some time after 93 CE, because of the author's reliance on Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews, written in that year. So, if Luke not personally familiar with the life of Jesus and if he was writing at least 60 years after the supposed event, then even the best historian could be wrong.

Overall, the apparent inconsistency with John's Gospel, along with the lack of expected evidence and the late authorship of Acts, point to the probability that Pentecost did not really happen.