<p>19:2 <i>And he said to them: Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed? And they said to him: No. We have not even heard</i>- The aorist implies 'we did not hear', i.e. at the point of baptism.</p><p><em>That there is a Holy Spirit</em>- As followers of Moses and John the Baptist, they were surely aware of the concept of Holy Spirit. We must fill in the ellipses surely required by the context- &quot;there is gift of the Holy Spirit&quot;, remembering that the Spirit was not poured out until the Lord's glorification. Jn. 7:39 likewise says that &quot;the Holy Spirit was not yet&quot;, i.e. the outpouring of Holy Spirit. Perhaps what they meant was that they were aware that John had spoken of an outpouring of the Spirit as a result of the Lord's work, but they had not heard whether this had yet happened. After all, they had encountered John some years ago in Palestine and were now in Ephesus, maybe cut off from news of the progress of Christianity.</p>