Ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost (Acts 2)

Acts chapter two is where we finally get to Pentecost and the baptism of the Holy Ghost. There's a lot of weird, supernatural, one-of-a-kind stuff going on in this chapter, so, yeah, it's going to be called absurd by the SAB. I already explained when the Holy Ghost was given in the last chapter.

The interesting thing about this event is that--as some have pointed out--the spiritual gift of "tongues" seems to be about speaking known languages, rather than glossolalia. The people who thought the disciples were drunk were probably speakers of Aramaic and Greek who couldn't figure out what was going on. If you don't know a foreign language and you hear it spoken, it's just nonsense to you.

Will those who call on the Lord be delivered? Yes and no. I think there's more of an element of earnestness here that simply saying a name. It's a contradiction if you take what Peter says at very simple face value, but I don't believe it's meant that way. I answered whether Jesus performed many signs and wonders in John chapter three, where the answer was yes. I answered who raised Jesus from the dead in John chapter two, where the answer was all persons of the Trinity were involved. Verse 31 has Peter mention Jesus being in Hell (the Greek word here is "Hades") and the SAB wonders why. I talked about Hell in John chapter five, but I didn't discuss this aspect in depth; the reason Jesus went to Hell was twofold: the sin of the world was put on him at his crucifixion, and he needed to go to Hell apparently to set free some (or maybe all?) of the people held captive there.

In whose name is baptism to be performed? I don't think it particularly matters, actually. Yes, Matthew reads differently, but the important thing is just that baptism happens for new believers in Jesus. Yes, 3,000 new Christians were baptized that day, which is a lot, but there were a lot of Jews in Jerusalem at that time because it was still the tail end of Passover, which lasts for seven days. And also yes, technically the early church, well through the 2nd century, practiced what was essentially a form of communism!