<p>2:14 <i>But Peter, standing with the eleven</i>- Peter stood up along with the eleven others; thus the record accepts that Mathias had been accepted and that the entity known as 'the twelve' had been reconstituted. We read of &quot;the twelve&quot; in Acts 6:2. However we do not read further in Acts after 6:2 of &quot;the twelve&quot; so it would appear they played no official role in the later development of the church.</p><p><i>L</i><i>ifted up his voice and addressed them: You men of Judea and all that dwell in Jerusalem, let this be understood by you, and listen to my words</i>- It would have become public news in Jerusalem that the man who nearly killed Malchus had slipped in to the High Priest&rsquo;s yard, and just got out in time before they lynched him. And the fool he had made of himself would for sure have been exaggerated and gossiped all round. Jerusalem would have had the small town gossip syndrome, especially at Passover time. Every one of his oaths with which he had disowned his Lord would have been jokingly spread around in the three days while Jesus lay dead. But then Peter&rsquo;s preaching of the Gospel after the resurrection reached a pinnacle which probably no other disciple has reached, not even Paul. No one individual made such huge numbers of converts, purely on the basis of his words of preaching. Nobody else was <i>so</i> persuasive, could cut hardened men to the heart as he did, and motivate them to be baptized immediately. He brought men far more highly educated and cultured than himself to openly say from the heart: &ldquo;What shall we do?&rdquo;, in the sense: &lsquo;Having done what we&rsquo;ve done, whatever will become of us?&rsquo;. And of course Peter had been in just that desperate position a month ago. He was just the man to persuade them. And yet on the other hand, there was no man more unlikely. The rules of social and spiritual appropriacy demanded that someone who had so publicly denied his Lord keep on the back burner for quite some time. And Peter of all men would have wished it this way. See on Acts 10:35,36.</p>