4. Farewell to the Ephesian Church (20:17–38)
4. Farewell to the Ephesian Church (20:17–38)
This speech warns Paul’s successors as leaders of the Ephesian church—and those leading the church in Luke’s own generation—to watch out for greedy teachers who seek their own disciples (Acts 20:30) to exploit them (20:29, 33).[428] In this passage, Paul’s life becomes a model for sacrificial ministry.
That a speech was given on this occasion is very likely. Although Luke has a predilection for speeches, the leaders of the early Christian movement were known especially for speaking. One might accuse Luke of inventing a speech in Ephesus, but there is little reason to invent one for Miletus, particularly with the inconvenience of Ephesian elders needing to come there to hear it.[429] Probably Luke would also not invent a reference to Paul not seeing the Ephesians again, at least if he knew the claims suggested by 1 and 2 Timothy.[430] Although Paul may have spent nearly three years in Ephesus, however (20:31), neither Luke nor Paul makes any attempt to match this speech with a specifically “Ionian” mode of declamation.[431]
a. Introduction
Because questions of rhetorical genre, authenticity, and the nature of the speech’s rhetoric inform our understanding of the speech, it is important to introduce these issues before investigating the speech further.
I. GENRE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Dibelius compares this speech with “something like a will: it provides for the future.”[432] Many scholars have developed the idea that this speech is a testament,[433] though the idea has its detractors.[434] Because there is no thought of Paul on his deathbed bequeathing promises to his heirs, technically the speech is simply a farewell discourse. Nevertheless, because testaments were a particular type of farewell discourse, they may help inform the paraenetic function of this discourse.
(1) Testaments and Farewell Discourses
Scholars have proposed that Paul’s Miletus speech functions as his testament or, more broadly (and, technically, accurately), a farewell discourse. Ancient literature often emphasized the words of a dying person; thus the impending death of a sage frequently became the occasion for paraenesis.[435] Many people believed that shortly before death, some people exercised keen prophetic insight or received special revelations,[436] an idea perhaps related to testaments that offer predictions for the future.[437] As in many cultures,[438] a person might leave special instructions before dying or permanently departing; some scholars contend that the same format could be employed for a departure speech not necessarily indicating imminent death.[439]
Formal literary testaments often included warnings to keep the stipulations of the covenant; mention of a successor;[440] and a prayer.[441] Testaments also often include a blessing, burial instructions, an oath, and descriptions of sad parting and the person’s death. But a testament need not (and most testaments did not) include all these characteristics to fit the general context of the genre; thus, for example, many (not all) NT scholars place Mark 13 and 2 Peter in this category despite their overlap with only some of these characteristics.[442]
Testaments, as a traditionally conceived genre, typically are Jewish,[443] but they also appear in Greek and Roman literature. Thus several centuries before Luke, Xenophon depicts Cyrus calling his sons before his death, addressing them as sons (παῖδες, Cyr. 8.7.6), reviewing his life (8.7.6–7), defining succession for his heirs (8.7.8–12), and offering special counsel to his sons (8.7.13–28).[444] As suggested above, formal, literary testaments (generally pseudepigraphic) reflect the broader idea of deathbed instructions or prized final words.[445] More broadly still, farewell or departure speeches were a frequent biblical[446] and early Jewish literary form;[447] they also appear elsewhere in Greco-Roman works[448] and early Christian works.[449]
Technically, this is a farewell discourse (cf. Luke 22:15–37), of which a testament was only one type (and one that was normally given by a person who was dying, which Paul is not going to do just yet).[450] Unlike Jewish testaments, farewell speeches did not need to end with the speaker’s death; this broader genre seems more appropriate here, since whatever the Miletus speech implies about the eventual future, it does not end with Paul’s death.[451] Indeed, although the speech implies the possibility of Paul’s death (Acts 20:22–24) and declares that Paul will be arrested (20:23) and not see his hearers again (20:25), neither the speech (20:22) nor the prophecies (20:23; 21:11) are explicit about his death. “Departure” in 20:29 is appropriate to a farewell speech without implying Paul’s death. Testaments do, however, offer one sample of such farewell discourses and hence serve a useful role in understanding this passage. A prominent Greek example was Socrates’s testament, so to speak, composed by Plato in his Phaedo. Some writers focus on a single ancient farewell discourse as the model,[452] but while some offer more parallels than others, the genre was familiar enough that it is not likely that one single, specific source is in view.
(2) Deliberative and Epideictic Aspects
Because this speech is a farewell discourse, some scholars contend that it is epideictic. Duane Watson maintains that most speeches in historians were epideictic and that a farewell speech (συντακτικὸς λόγος) was normally epideictic.[453] Although speeches in historians were often not epideictic (e.g., exhortations before battle and political debates are more deliberative, with epideictic elements), epideictic speeches were indeed common there (e.g., funerary orations). Watson argues that Luke may weave in deliberative or judicial elements while remaining especially epideictic, emphasizing Paul as a model more than giving an apologetic for him.[454] Certainly at least a significant element of epideictic is present; Luke honors Paul in this work, and ancient speakers could even offer themselves as a moral example for the less explicit purpose of praising themselves.[455]
But is the focus of Acts 20 on praising Paul as a model?[456] Or does Paul’s example serve a primarily deliberative function (cf. 20:35)? Here, perhaps, testaments provide a useful corrective to a general appeal to the “farewell” genre. Although farewell discourses were often epideictic, the moral exhortation here, as in most Jewish testaments, serves a deliberative function within the narrative world.[457] For Luke’s own audience, the portrayal of Paul may well function, to a significant extent, epideictically, but within the narrative world, using oneself as a moral example within a speech could have a deliberative function (as, e.g., in 1 Cor 9). (Even for Luke’s audience, Luke’s apologetic for Paul[458] is also an apologetic for his Gentile mission, and a model of commitment to that mission.)
The speech is mostly unadorned, a style inappropriate to epideictic rhetoric.[459] Although we may not accept the speech as primarily epideictic, however, Watson provides many useful parallels to epideictic speeches:[460]
I am inclined to think that such parallels fit Paul’s presentation of himself as an example, but within a larger speech with a larger purpose. Such parallels also suggest Luke’s function, in his larger narrative, of presenting Paul as a model (and praising a model can sometimes appear in epideictic speech), yet even in this larger setting, the model serves as an example for the church and hence performs a deliberative function (see Acts 20:35).[464]
In the end, speeches often overlapped among the categories of the arbitrary threefold categorization of judicial, epideictic, and deliberative speeches,[465] and the dispute may be mostly semantic.[466] Luke’s work as a whole may be partly an apologetic for Paul but also partly a deliberative exhortation to continue the same Gentile mission to which he devoted himself.[467]
Luke is not bound to a single set of speech conventions if his speech serves multiple functions. The usual sort of farewell speech (προπεμπτικόν) was epideictic but could be addressed to the departing traveler.[468] The farewell speech that one who was departing addressed to those left behind was epideictic but differed from most elements here (though there are similarities, e.g., 20:25): it expressed distress and grief at leaving, then provided a formal encomium of the city being left.[469] Undoubtedly most farewells, including in speeches, did not follow such strict rhetorical models, but the differences caution us against depending too much on the “genre” of farewell speeches.[470]
(3) Commissioning Speech
As a speech by a leader to followers, Paul’s Miletus speech fits a model different from that of usual farewell speeches. A leader might rehearse the fact that he has done only good for the people now refusing to follow him, thereby exhorting them to follow better (Arrian Alex. 7.9.1–7.11.2; cf. an OT prophetic “farewell” speech, 1 Sam 12:3).[471]
More than the typical Greek farewell speech (but something like a testament), this speech in Acts represents a commissioning or passing on of the calling, a passing on of Paul’s care for the Ephesian church to its elders. Thus it can draw on various conventions and motifs of OT prophetic speeches, since it focuses on call and ministry.[472] The same is true for other biblical and early Jewish speeches that assign work to the hearers to carry on (as in 1 Kgs 2:1–10; 1 Macc 2:49–70).[473] All these aspects support a deliberative function.
Speeches often introduced a primary theme toward the beginning, and this speech emphasizes Paul’s example of sacrificial service (Acts 20:19). This example dominates most of the speech, informing Paul’s ministry in Ephesus (20:20–21), his willingness to sacrifice his life in Jerusalem (20:22–25), and his approach to possessions (20:33–35). In the center of all these claims about Paul’s own previous ministry, Paul exhorts the elders to take over (20:28, 31a); in this context, he is inviting them to carry on his Ephesian work with the same spirit of self-sacrificial love.
(4) Literary Connections with the Mission
The commissioning emphasis of the speech becomes clearest when one notes several allusions to Jesus’s apostolic instructions to the seventy in Luke 10. Here, as there, the calling is expanded and passed on (though Luke does not narrate the activity of the elders):
There are more details that are not parallel than those that are,[475] suggesting that the missionary discourse provides only one among several sources for allusions. But some of the parallels are strong enough to suggest that Luke had in view a commissioning sort of farewell speech, in which the work was multiplied by being passed on to other laborers.
One may gather the same impression by comparisons with Jesus’s farewell discourse in Luke,[476] where Jesus presents himself as a model (Luke 22:20, 24–27), as Paul does here.[477] Since this seems Luke’s hortatory point in developing the pattern from Jesus to Peter to Paul as models for the church’s continuing ministry, this speech to believers fills a strategic function in the work as a whole.[478]
Repetitions are sometimes a key to emphatic elements, and they highlight in this instance the focus on ministry questions; Tannehill finds several of these elements arranged in chiastic (inverted parallel) sequence:[479]
A you know . . . serving (Acts 20:18–19)
B whole time . . . tears (20:18b–20)
C did not shrink from announcing (20:20)
D bearing witness (20:21)
D′ bearing witness (20:24)
C′ did not shrink from announcing (20:27)
B′ three years night and day . . . with tears (20:31)
A′ you know . . . served (20:34)
II. AUTHENTICITY
Clearly, Luke has arranged the material in ways that connect with his own overarching themes and purposes, as he has done with the other speeches. But does Luke reflect at least the basic substance of Paul’s message on the occasion, or did he compose the speech from whole cloth? This is the only lengthy speech to appear in the context of the “we” narrative—that is, in the midst of Acts’ most directly eyewitness material. This is also the one speech in Acts with the most extrinsic parallels to support an argument for genuine Pauline material.
This commentary on the speech will note other factors suggesting that Luke has condensed an actual speech rather than composed one from whole cloth. For example, an allusion to Ezek 34 (in Acts 20:28–29) may follow an allusion to Ezek 33 (in Acts 20:26), as if Paul’s actual speech, here mainly summarized, was offering a fuller explanation from a Scripture text. Moreover, Paul concludes on the issue of financial sacrifice (20:33–35), which fits the context, in Paul’s life, of a journey to deliver his churches’ financial offerings to the Jerusalem church (a point that Luke had no reason to invent, since he barely mentions the collection). But in this section we focus primarily on Pauline parallels.
(1) Pauline Style[480]
Whether invented by Luke to sound Pauline or dependent on Pauline tradition or on an actual speech by Paul heard by the author, this speech sounds more like the Paul of the epistles than does any other speech in Acts (despite the brief allusions in 9:20; 13:39). As Johnson puts it (regarding it as Luke’s προσωποποιία): “This is surely not Stephen or Peter delivering the speech. It is unmistakably Paul, and a Paul who presents himself to this community in terms remarkably like the ones we recognize in the letters we know Paul himself wrote to his communities.”[481] This judgment is appropriate; after all, other speeches in Acts are evangelistic, judicial, or otherwise apologetic. Only this one is addressed “to a Christian community—in other words, it is addressed to an ‘epistle-like’ situation.”[482] Most of Paul’s speeches in Acts are evangelistic (deliberative) or apologetic (judicial); of the speeches attributed to him in Acts, this is the only one exhorting Christians—the primary setting of Paul’s letters.[483] It comes as no surprise, then, if Luke’s Paul sounds most like the Paul of the epistles when he provides analogous kinds of exhortations for the same sort of audience. This speech is the book’s best test case for compatibility with Paul.
Some scholars believe that Luke freely composed this speech to address the issues of his own generation.[484] Others believe that Luke created the speech but used genuine Pauline thoughts (arranging it with conventional farewell motifs and conforming it to the pattern of Jesus in his first volume).[485] These scholars sometimes argue that the Pauline thought may be based on general knowledge rather than on the speech given on this occasion.[486] Because we lack external means to evaluate what Paul may have spoken then, we can evaluate only whether the speech is genuinely “Pauline,” not the degree to which it resembles Paul’s words on this occasion.
At the same time, if Luke imitates Paul’s style and content (since historians were expected to make their speeches as authentic to the speaker as possible), it follows that he had access to that style and that content through some source. Most scholars doubt that Luke knew Paul’s epistles;[487] undoubtedly he knew that Paul had written some, but he seems to have been more interested in more direct biographic sources. If this is the case, Luke’s audience may have also known more about Paul’s life than about his “style,” so that Luke’s adherence to this style is more a sign of fidelity to Paul and Luke’s historical task than an attempt to impress his audience with his ability to adopt Pauline style.
This is the first speech appearing in a “we” section in Acts,[488] and given Luke’s careful notes on the itinerary and this commentary’s view of the “we” material’s author (see comment on Acts 16:10), it is reasonable to hope that, however he may have adapted it to fit his larger work, Luke did have access to the substance of this particular speech.
Although it goes without saying that Luke has edited this speech, like all his material, for the sake of his larger narrative unity, many scholars concur with the verdict that this is the most “Pauline” of Paul’s speeches in Acts, an observation that comports well with its setting.[489]
(2) Particular Parallels
Parallels here with Pauline letters are extensive; although some of these parallels may simply reflect early Christian language more generally and some are also Lukan language, nothing in the speech is foreign to the “epistolary” Paul.[490] The articulation of ministry principles here[491] fits the practical, pastoral concern of the Paul of the letters.[492] This speech employs language familiar from philosophers and moralists,[493] just as Paul’s letters do.[494] Paul’s themes here also comport well with the Pauline letters.[495] Steve Walton’s extensive study of parallels between this speech and just one of Paul’s letters, 1 Thessalonians (probably his earliest extant letter), uncovers numerous parallels.[496]
Although some others might be added,[497] Stanley Porter provides an extensive list of even verbal parallels in Paul’s letters:[498]
In addition to these verbal parallels are biographic information (e.g., Paul’s reluctance to burden churches; Acts 20:33–34; 1 Cor 9; 2 Cor 11:7–11; 1 Thess 2:9–12) and theological similarities (cf. perhaps “blood of his own” in Acts 20:28). Porter remarks that Luke’s desire to add “an authentic Pauline stamp,” held by most scholars, works here only if Luke knew either Paul’s letters or Paul himself.[506]
Much of the speech could reflect early Christian paraenesis used more generally, found in Petrine as well as Pauline literature.[507] For example, Peter, as an elder, exhorts fellow elders (1 Pet 5:1; cf. Acts 20:17) to shepherd God’s flock willingly (1 Pet 5:2; cf. Acts 20:28), not seeking gain (1 Pet 5:2; cf. Acts 20:33) but being examples to the flock (1 Pet 5:3; cf. Acts 20:35). But Paul also uses himself as an example (e.g., 1 Cor 9; 11:1), and Pauline literature employs pastoral language (9:7; Eph 4:11), warns against seeking gain from ministry (1 Tim 3:3; 6:5), and certainly sets the example of not seeking gain (1 Cor 9; 2 Cor 12:13). Despite more general elements, the impression of Paulinicity in this speech is more marked than in Luke’s other Pauline speeches, as noted above.
If the speech includes elements that could genuinely reflect Paul, it seems likely that in this case these elements also reflect the occasion, since (as already noted) this speech occurs at a point when the author of the “we” narratives was present. But some doubt that the speech matches the occasion, since it offers a defense of Paul when no charges are raised in the context.[508] To this are offered here two responses.
First, it is likely that Paul’s reputation was indeed under serious attack in Ephesus; he was probably not welcome there (see comment on Acts 20:16), and his enemies (cf. Acts 19:38; 21:27–28) could speak against him without him or his closest associates being present to offer a defense. This situation could create a temptation for the local believers to dissociate themselves from his ministry as well because his name could be a liability to the preaching of his gospel (cf. the situation in Phil 1:17). Under similar circumstances, Paul offers a defense of his ministry in Thessalonica, although using stock apologetic that does not require us to reconstruct specific charges against him (1 Thess 2:3–11).[509] Second, however, the apparently forensic element fits a sort of farewell speech. Samuel defends himself far more explicitly in 1 Sam 12:3–5 without any explicit accusation against him in the narrative context (though cf. the concern regarding his sons in 1 Sam 8:4–5).
III. STRUCTURE
Views on the speech’s structure vary considerably, which is not surprising given divergent views about its content, emphasis, and genre.[510] Conzelmann draws on OT analogies to suggest the following:[511]