ACTS 8

ACTS 8

ACTS 8

c. Saul’s agreement (8:1a)

1a  Saul fully approved of his execution.

la  Saul, a native of the Cilician city of Tarsus, as we learn later (9:11), may have attended the synagogue in Jerusalem where Stephen engaged in disputation with the spokesmen for the old order (6:9). He too was exceptionally farsighted, and realized as clearly as Stephen did the fundamental incompatibility between the old order and the new. The temporizing policy of his master Gamaliel¹ (5:34–39) was not for him: he saw that no compromise was logically possible, and if the old order was to be preserved, the new faith must be stamped out. Hence he expressed his agreement with Stephen’s death sentence as publicly as possible by guarding the executioners’ clothes²—an action which he did not readily forget (cf. 22:20). It has been suggested further that he acted as praeco or herald, charged with proclaiming that the convicted person was about to be executed for the specified offense.³

The refusal to compromise in the issue between Judaism and Christianity which determined his present attitude continued to determine his policy in later days when, as preacher of the gospel and teacher of the church, he built up the work which at first he had endeavored to destroy.

B. PHILIP (8:1B–40)

1. Persecution and Dispersion (8:1b–3)

1b  That day a great persecution⁴ broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all dispersed among the regions of Judaea and Samaria, except the apostles.⁵

2  Stephen’s body was taken up and buried by pious men, who made loud lamentation over him.

3  But Saul proceeded to ravage the church: he entered their houses one by one, dragged away men and women, and handed them over for imprisonment.

1b–2  The law prescribed the duty of burying the bodies of executed persons, but discouraged public lamentation for them.⁶ Stephen, at any rate, received the last tribute due to him from devout⁷ men who evidently disapproved of his condemnation and execution.

His death, however, was the signal for an immediate campaign of repression against the Jerusalem church. If we read the present paragraph in its wider context, we may conclude that it was the Hellenists in the church (the group in which Stephen had been a leader) who formed the main target of attack, and that it was they for the most part who were compelled to leave Jerusalem.⁸ Some of them, indeed, may have been convinced that, by its rejection of Stephen’s testimony, the city had incurred irrevocable doom; it was the path of wisdom, therefore, to abandon it.⁹ From this time onward the Jerusalem church appears to have been a predominantly “Hebrew” body.¹⁰

The twelve apostles remained in Jerusalem, partly no doubt because they conceived it to be their duty to stay at their post,¹¹ and partly, one may gather, because the popular resentment was directed not so much at them as at the leaders of the Hellenists in the church. The persecution and dispersion, however, brought about a beginning of the fulfilment of the risen Lord’s commission to his disciples: “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea and Samaria …” (1:8). “The churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judaea” (to borrow Paul’s language in 1 Thess. 2:14)¹² traced their inception as separate communities from this time of persecution.

3  The prime agent in the repressive campaign was Saul of Tarsus, who now carried into more effective action the attitude to the new movement which he had displayed at the stoning of Stephen. Armed with the necessary authority from the chief-priestly leaders of the Sanhedrin,¹³ he harried¹⁴ the church, arresting its members in their own homes and sending them off to prison. A zealot for the ancestral traditions of his nation,¹⁵ he saw that the new faith menaced those traditions. Drastic action was called for: these people, he thought, were not merely misguided enthusiasts whose sincere embracing of error called for patient enlightenment; they were deliberate impostors, proclaiming that God had raised from the tomb to be Lord and Messiah a man whose manner of death was sufficient to show that the divine curse rested on him.¹⁶

2. Philip in Samaria (8:4–8)

4  Those, then, who were dispersed went about spreading the good news.

5  Philip went down to a¹⁷ city of Samaria and began to preach Christ to them.

6  The crowds paid attention as one man to what Philip was saying as they listened to him and saw the signs which he performed.

7  For unclean spirits, with a loud noise, came out of many who were possessed,¹⁸ and many paralyzed and lame people were cured.

8  There was great joy in that city.

4  As the old Israel had its dispersion among the Gentiles, so must the new people of God be dispersed.¹⁹ The words of an apocalyptic writer later in the first century A.D. have been adduced as a parallel to Luke’s narrative here: “I will scatter this people [the Jews of Judaea after A.D. 70] among the Gentiles, that they may do the Gentiles good” (2 Bar. 1:4).²⁰ On the present occasion, the dispersed believers did the utmost good to the people among whom they went, by telling them the good news of the deliverance accomplished by Christ. Not only did they do this in Palestine, but some of them carried the message much farther afield, according to a later passage of Acts which begins with the same wording as this (11:19–26).

5  For the present, however, the interest of the narrative is concentrated on Philip, another Hellenistic leader who, like Stephen, was one of the seven almoners appointed to manage the daily administration of the communal fund. Driven from his work in Jerusalem, Philip went north to Samaria and preached the gospel there.

Between the populations of Judaea and Samaria there was a long-standing cleavage, going back to the isolation of Judah from the other tribes of Israel in the settlement period (cf. Deut. 33:7). This cleavage found notable expression in the disruption of the Hebrew monarchy after Solomon’s death (c. 930 B.C.). In spite of attempts to effect a reconciliation in postexilic times,²¹ the cleavage was widened when the Samaritans were refused a share in the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and erected a rival temple on their sacred hill Gerizim.²² The temple on Gerizim was destroyed by the Hasmonaean ruler John Hyrcanus I (134–104 B.C.) when he conquered Samaria and added it to his own realm.²³ With the Roman conquest of Palestine in 63 B.C., the Samaritans were liberated from Judaean domination, but the New Testament and the writings of Josephus bear ample witness to the unfriendly relations which persisted between the two groups.

It was thus a bold movement on Philip’s part to preach the gospel to the Samaritans. The Samaritans did, however, share with the Jews the hope of a coming deliverer whom they envisaged in terms of the prophet like Moses of Deut. 18:15–19;²⁴ at a later time, if not at this stage, they described him as the Taheb or “restorer.”²⁵ Philip would be able to build on this hope when he “began to preach Christ to them”: Jesus, it appears, was already identified by his followers in Jerusalem, both “Hebrews” and “Hellenists,” as the promised prophet like Moses.

It is uncertain which city of Samaria was evangelized by Philip. The ancient city called Samaria had been refounded by Herod the Great and renamed Sebaste, in honor of the Roman emperor,²⁶ but it was a Hellenistic city, and the impression given by our narrative is that the people to whom Philip preached were genuine Samaritans. Another suggestion is that it was Gitta, which (according to Justin Martyr) was the home town of Simon Magus.²⁷ Most probably we are intended to think of a place in the neighborhood of Shechem. According to the Fourth Gospel, both John the Baptist and Jesus had been active for a period in this area (John 3:23; 4:4–42); their activity could have provided a foundation on which Philip built.²⁸

6–8  Whichever city it was, Philip’s ministry was marked by works of exorcism and healing so striking that great numbers believed his message and were filled with rejoicing. As usual in the record of Acts, the beneficiaries of the works of healing were paralytics and lame people. As in the ministry of Jesus himself and of his apostles, so in the ministry of Philip these works of mercy and power were visible “signs” confirming the message that he proclaimed.

3. Simon Magus Believes and Is Baptized (8:9–13)

9  Now at that time there was in the city a man named Simon, practising magic and striking amazement into the Samaritan nation with his claim to be someone great.

10  They all paid heed to him, great and small: “This man,” they said, “is the power of God which is called great.”

11  They paid him the more heed because he had struck amazement into them for a long time with his magic arts.

12  But when they believed Philip as he preached the good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.

13  Even Simon himself believed and was baptized, and adhered to Philip, and as he saw signs and great works of power being performed, he was amazed.

9–11 Simon Magus plays an extraordinary role in early Christian literature. The word “magus” originally denoted a member of the Median priestly tribe,²⁹ but it came to be used in an extended sense of a practitioner of various kinds of sorcery and even quackery, like Elymas, the sorcerer of Paphos in Cyprus, whom we meet later in the narrative of Acts (13:6–11). The “magi” or “wise men” from the east (Matt. 2:1), who saw the rising star of the newborn king of the Jews, were evidently astrologers. This Simon is depicted in postapostolic writings as the father of all Gnostic heresies.³⁰ Justin Martyr tells how he secured a following of devotees not only in Samaria but in Rome, to which he went in the time of Claudius.³¹ In the apocryphal Acts of Peter (4–32) he is said to have corrupted the Christians in Rome by his false teaching and made the authorities ill-disposed toward them, but to have been worsted at last in a magical contest with Peter. But it is in the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions and Homilies that the Simon legend is most curiously elaborated: in them he not only appears as the untiring adversary of Peter but seems, to some extent at least, to serve as a camouflage for Paul, reflecting anti-Pauline sentiments among some of the Ebionites and similar Jewish-Christian groups.³² It has been thought by some scholars that the heresiarch Simon, founder of the Gnostic sect of the Simonians,³³ was originally a different person from the Simon of Acts, but that they became confused in later tradition.³⁴ More probably they were the same person: Luke knows more about Simon than he records; in this account he relates only what he judged relevant to his purpose.

At any rate, the Samaritan Simon impressed his fellow-countrymen greatly with the exercise of his magic powers, so much so that they accepted his own account of himself and regarded him as the grand vizier of the supreme God, the channel both of divine power and of divine revelation.³⁵

12–13  But Simon Magus himself was impressed by the actions and words of Philip. Like the magicians of Egypt in the presence of Moses, he recognized that the messenger of the true God had access to a source of power that oustripped his own. The proclamation heralded by such an envoy must be accepted with respect, and Simon “believed.” The nature of his belief must remain uncertain. No doubt it was sincere as far as it went, but it was superficial and inadequate. Jesus himself, we are told in John 2:23–24,attached little value to the faith that rests on miracles alone. Yet, when the others who believed Philip’s announcement of the “good news of the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ”³⁶ were baptized, Simon came to receive baptism too, and remained in Philip’s company. No question seems to have been raised about the propriety of baptizing Samaritans: even if Samaritans were excluded from the scope of the original mission of the Twelve, they were indubitably “lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt. 10:5–6). The adhesion of Simon and his followers to Philip and his converts might have given a peculiar color to Samaritan Christianity, but it was not destined to last long.

4. Peter and John Visit Samaria (8:14–17)

14  When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.

15  When Peter and John came down, they prayed for the converts, asking that they might receive the Holy Spirit.

16  As yet he had not fallen on any of them; they had only been baptized into the name of the Lord Jesus.

17  Then Peter and John laid their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.

14  News of Philip’s evangelistic enterprise in Samaria was brought to Jerusalem, and the apostles sent two of their number to Samaria to inspect this work. In the earlier years of the Christian mission, the Jerusalem apostles seem to have regarded it as their duty to exercise a general supervision over the progress of the gospel wherever it might be carried (cf. 11:22). Peter and John, the two leaders of the apostolate, carried out this mission. This is the last occasion on which John plays any part by name in the narrative of Acts; here, as before, his role is a silent one alongside Peter’s. John, with his brother James, had once suggested that fire should be called down from heaven on a Samaritan community for its inhospitable behavior to their Master (Luke 9:52–55). It was with a different attitude that he now set out for Samaria with Peter. The earlier ban on the apostles’ entering any city of the Samaritans (Matt. 10:5) had been rescinded by the unlimited commission of witness laid on them by the risen Christ, in which Samaria was one of the areas explicitly mentioned (Acts 1:8).

Philip now disappears from the Samaritan scene. It has been held that the account of Peter and John’s visit was originally an alternative to the account of Philip’s mission;³⁷ but Philip’s mission is presupposed as a background to the events of Peter and John’s visit.

15–17  The sequel to the apostles’ arrival has been the subject of much theological debate. Unlike the Jerusalem converts on the day of Pentecost, the Samaritan converts, although baptized by Philip “into the name of the Lord Jesus,”³⁸ had not at the same time received the gift of the Holy Spirit. But when Peter and John came to their city, they prayed for them, asking God to grant them the Holy Spirit, and then, when they laid their hands on the converts, the Holy Spirit came on them. It is clearly implied that their reception of the Spirit was marked by external manifestations such as had marked his descent on the earliest disciples at Pentecost.³⁹

Many ancient and modern commentators have inferred that what Peter and John did was to perform the rite of confirmation; some have inferred further that confirmation can be administered only by an apostle or someone in the succession of the apostolic ministry (i.e., in episcopal orders). But it is straining the sense of the present narrative to extract this meaning from it. If confirmation by an apostle were necessary for the reception of the Spirit,⁴⁰ one might have expected this to be stated more explicitly in one or more of the relevant New Testament passages. But no such thing is hinted at, even in passages where it would certainly be introduced if there were any substance in it. It is not suggested by Paul when he speaks in 2 Cor. 1:21–22 of Christians’ being anointed, sealed, and given the Spirit in their hearts as a guarantee; he does not include the power of thus imparting the Spirit among the spiritual gifts listed in 1 Cor. 12:4–11, and when he thanks God that he did not baptize more than a handful of his Corinthian converts (1 Cor. 1:14–16) the whole force of his argument would disappear if we had to suppose that, even so, he confirmed them all. In other places in Acts, too, there is no hint that apostolic hands were laid on converts before they received the Spirit. Nothing is said about this being done to the Pentecostal believers at Jerusalem (2:38–42) or, later, to the household of Cornelius at Caesarea (10:44–48). The only near parallel to the present occasion is the exceptional case of the Ephesian disciples in 19:1–7. In general, it seems to be assumed throughout the New Testament that those who believe and are baptized have also the Spirit of God.

In the present instance, some special evidence may have been necessary to assure the Samaritans, so accustomed to being despised as outsiders by the people of Jerusalem, that they were fully incorporated into the new community of the people of God. It was one thing for them to be baptized by a free-lance evangelist like Philip, but not until they had been acknowledged and welcomed by the leaders of the Jerusalem church did they experience the signs which confirmed and attested their membership in the Spirit-possessed society. “The imposition of hands is then,” in the words of G. W. H. Lampe, “primarily a token of fellowship and solidarity; it is only secondarily an effective symbol of the gift of the Spirit; it becomes such a symbol solely in virtue of being a sign of incorporation into the Church of the Spirit.”⁴¹

Luke presents the Samaritan mission as the first important advance in the Christian mission. The record of a Samaritan “Pentecost” implies that a new nucleus of the expanding community has been established, so that the gospel could now “radiate outwards from this new centre of the Spirit’s mission.”⁴² Moreover, “the new Israel of the Church of Jesus Christ had succeeded in bringing the whole kingdom of David under the sway of his Son’s sceptre, something the Jews had tried, with much less success, by force of arms during the last five hundred years.”⁴³

5. Peter and Simon Magus (8:18–24)

18  When Simon saw that the Spirit⁴⁴ was given through the laying on of the apostles’ hands, he offered them money.

19  “Give me also this authority,” he said, “so that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.”

20  But Peter said to him, “Perdition take you and your silver together, for thinking that the gift of God could be obtained with money.

21  You have no part or share in this matter, for your heart is not upright before God.

22  So repent of this wickedness of yours, and pray to the Lord that the thought of your heart may be forgiven.

23  I see that you are still full of gall and wormwood, still wearing the fetters of unrighteousness.”

24  Simon replied, “Do you please pray to the Lord for me, so that none of the things you have said may come on me.” ⁴⁵

18–19  Whether the external signs which accompanied the reception of the Spirit on this occasion were identical with the Pentecostal signs or not, they were at any rate of so impressive a nature that Simon Magus craved the power to reproduce them at will. Now he felt he was getting near the heart of these mysteries; the latest phenomena were obviously associated with the imposition of hands. If only they could be associated with the imposition of his hands, what an access of authority and prestige would be his! So, regarding Peter and John as extraordinarily gifted practitioners of religious magic, he offered to buy from them a share in their secret power. It is this act of Simon that has given the term “simony” to our religious vocabulary.

20–23  Simon was quite unprepared for the stern words which his simple-minded request evoked. On an earlier occasion Peter and John were unable to give silver or gold (3:6); now they refused to accept any, and were shocked that it should have been offered to them. Simon’s idea that God’s free gift could be bought and sold showed that he had no appreciation at all of the inward character of the gospel or the operation of the Spirit. “Perdition take your silver,” said Peter, “as it will take you too unless you repent and seek forgiveness for your wicked thought.” Simon had believed Philip’s message and been baptized, but he still manifested the signs of his old unregenerate nature. The poisonous root of superstitious self-seeking had not been eradicated from his heart; his soul was still held fast in the “fetters of unrighteousness.”⁴⁶ It was doubtful, in Peter’s eyes, if Simon had experienced the grace of God in any real sense. Simon interpreted all that he saw and heard in terms of his own standards, but the gospel belonged to a completely new dimension, to which he remained a stranger. In this realm he clearly had “neither part nor share.”

Luke’s account of this confrontation between Peter and Simon provides the archetype for accounts of later confrontations between the two. Philip might have been content with Simon’s attachment to his converts, but the more stringent requirements of apostolic orthodoxy could find no room for Simon and his followers in the believing community. Those who care to speculate on the might-have-beens of history may consider what the out-come would have been if Simon and his followers had been incorporated in the church at this early stage, and decide whether it would have been a good thing or a bad thing for the progress of Christianity.⁴⁷ Arnold Ehrhardt felt that “the Church lost a man here, who might have been saved; St Peter trampled down the new plantation of St Philip.”⁴⁸ Others will judge the situation differently.⁴⁹

24  Simon was terror-stricken. That he should have incurred the displeasure of men who apparently had so much power at their command was an awful thought; the Western text which tells us that he kept on weeping all the time Peter was speaking may be true enough to the facts, if Simon was the emotionally unstable type of medium who is not unknown in our own day, although the picture does not agree so well with the Simon Magus of later tradition. Peter had told him to pray for forgiveness, but to Simon’s way of thinking the prayers of such wielders of power as Peter and John would be more prevalent than his own, so he begged them to pray for him. Arnold Ehrhardt commends Simon for the “unexpected humility expressed in his beautiful reply” to Peter’s denunciation; he confesses, indeed, “to a feeling that Simon comes out much better from this encounter with the apostles than the tempestuous St Peter, who gives him no word of consolation.”⁵⁰

Canonical literature bids farewell to Simon with this entreaty on his lips that by the apostles’ intercession he may escape the judgment pronounced on his crooked heart.⁵¹ Later records of his activity give the impression that either they did not intercede for him or else their intercession was ineffective. Even so, Simon and his followers continued to be known as Christians, as Justin Martyr admits⁵²—a tribute, perhaps, to what Simon learned during the short time he spent in the company of Philip.

6. The Apostles Return to Jerusalem (8:25)

25  So, when they had borne their witness and spoken the word of the Lord, they made their way back to Jerusalem, and as they went they preached the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans.

25  Luke brings his account of the apostolic visitation to an end with a “generalizing summary” before he resumes the story of Philip. After what Peter and John had seen of the work of God in Philip’s temporary mission field, they had no hesitation in evangelizing other Samaritan communities as they took the southward road to Jerusalem.

7. Philip and the Ethiopian (8:26–40)

26  Now the angel of the Lord spoke to Philip. “Rise up,” he said, “and make your way southward⁵³ by the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a desert road.)

27  So he rose up and set out on his way. There he came on a man of Ethiopia, a powerful official of Kandakē, queen of the Ethiopians, a chamberlain who was in charge of all her treasury. He had gone to Jerusalem to worship,

28  and on his return journey he was sitting in his chariot, reading the prophet Isaiah.

29  The Spirit said to Philip, “Go up to this chariot and join it.”

30  So Philip ran up to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” he asked.

31  “How could I,” said the man, “unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get up and sit with him.

32  The passage of scripture which he was reading was this:

“Like a sheep he was led off to slaughter,

and like a lamb dumb before its shearer,

so he does not open his mouth.

33  As he was humiliated his rights were taken away: as for his progeny, who will declare it?

because his life is taken away from the earth.”

34  Then the chamberlain spoke up. “Tell me, please,” he said to Philip: “who is the person about whom the prophet says this? Himself, or someone else?”

35  Then Philip began to speak: beginning at this scripture he told him the good news about Jesus.

36  As they journeyed along the road, they came to some water. “Look,” said the chamberlain, “here is water.⁵⁴ What prevents me from being baptized?”⁵⁵

38  He gave orders for the chariot to halt, and both of them, Philip and the chamberlain, went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

39  When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away,⁵⁶ and the chamberlain did not see him again; for he continued joyfully on his way.

40  As for Philip, he turned up at Azotus.⁵⁷ Then, passing through city after city, he preached the gospel in them all until he came to Caesarea.

26  The story of Philip is now resumed. This part of it is told in a style which is in some respects reminiscent of the Old Testament narratives of Elijah.⁵⁸ While here, as in 5:19, the Greek phrase rendered “the angel of the Lord” is that used in LXX for the supernatural messenger who manifested the divine presence to human beings,⁵⁹ Luke’s statement that “the angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, ‘Rise up …’ ” is probably a vivid way of denoting Philip’s divine guidance. In the following narrative it is difficult to see any real distinction between “the angel of the Lord” and “the Spirit of the Lord,” although the Western text introduces a distinction in verse 39.

However that may be, Philip received a divine command to go south to join the Jerusalem-Gaza road—probably the road which ran by way of Beth-govrin, Ptolemy’s Betogabris (refounded later as Eleutheropolis by Septimius Severus). The word “desert” might refer either to Gaza or to the road. The older city of Gaza was destroyed by the Hasmonaean king Alexander Jannaeus in 96 B.C.; a new city was built nearer the Mediterranean by Gabinius in 57 B.C., the old city, as Strabo says, “remaining desert.”⁶⁰ On the other hand, it was important that Philip should know which road to take; had he taken another road, he would have missed the Ethiopian. Gaza figures in the Old Testament as one of the five cities of the Philistines.

27–28  Along the desert road to Gaza Philip came on a traveling chariot or covered wagon making its way southward; in it was seated the treasurer of the kingdom of Ethiopia (Nubia), who had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was now returning home. The kingdom of Ethiopia lay on the Nile, south of the first cataract (at Aswan); its two chief cities were Meroe and Napata. The king of Ethiopia was venerated as the child of the sun and regarded as too sacred a personage to discharge the secular functions of royalty; these were performed on his behalf by the queen-mother, who bore the dynastic title Kandakē.⁶¹

The Ethiopian treasurer was probably a Gentile worshiper of the God of Israel. He is referred to by a term which may have the more general sense of “chamberlain” or the stricter sense of “eunuch.”⁶² Eunuchs were commonly employed as court officials in the Near East from antiquity until quite recent times. The law of Israel excluded eunuchs from religious privileges enjoyed by other members of the community (Deut. 23:1); the removal of this ban is foreshadowed in Isa. 56:3–5. At any rate, like the Greeks mentioned in John 12:20,⁶³ this man had visited Jerusalem as a worshiper, probably at the time of one of the great pilgrimage festivals, and was now beguiling his homeward journey by studying a scroll of the book of Isaiah in the Greek version.

29–31  The divine monitor (called the Spirit this time) instructed Philip to approach the chariot, and as he did so, he heard the Ethiopian reading aloud from his copy of Isaiah. Reading in antiquity was almost invariably done aloud.⁶⁴ Why this should be so will be apparent to anyone who tries to read a copy of an ancient manuscript: the words need to be spelled out, and this is done more easily aloud than in silence. In addition, beginners regularly read aloud; it requires considerable experience (not to say sophistication) to read silently, though this stage is reached more quickly with modern print than with ancient handwriting.

The actual passage of the prophecy which the Ethiopian was reading aloud gave Philip his cue immediately: “Do you understand what you are reading?”⁶⁵ he asked. The man frankly acknowledged that he did not—that he could not without a guide or interpreter. As Philip appeared to know what he was talking about, the reader invited him to come up into the chariot and sit beside him. He certainly could have found no more reliable guide to the meaning of what he read than the man who had thus strangely accosted him.

32–33  For the passage which he was reading was the great prophecy of the suffering Servant of the Lord which had found its fulfilment so recently in the sacrifice and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The prophet himself, as he gave utterance to these words, might well have wondered and “inquired what person or time was indicated by the Spirit of Christ within” him when thus “predicting the suffering of Christ and the subsequent glory” (1 Pet. 1:11), for it must have been almost impossible to understand how his words could be fulfilled until Jesus came and fulfilled them. Jesus himself appears to have spoken of his death in terms of this prophecy (Isa. 52:13–53:12)—for example, when he said that “the Son of man … came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).⁶⁶ The words addressed to him by the heavenly voice at his baptism (Mark 1:11) implied that the royal Messiah, acclaimed by God as his Son in Ps. 2:7, was to fulfil his destiny in the mission mapped out for the Servant of the Lord introduced in Isa. 42:1. It was natural to link the oracle opening with “Behold my Servant” in Isa. 42:1 with that opening with similar words in Isa. 52:13. There is no evidence that anyone before the time of Jesus had identified the Isaianic Servant with the Davidic Messiah, but he seems to have identified them in his own person and by his own act. When he insisted that it was written concerning the Son of Man⁶⁷ that he should “suffer many things and be treated with contempt” (Mark 9:12), it is difficult to think of a more suitable scripture as the basis of such words than Isa. 52:13–53:12.

The section which Luke actually quotes (Isa. 53:7–8 LXX) does not indeed include any of the explicit statements of vicarious suffering found elsewhere in this “fourth Servant song.” One may ask if, as often in the New Testament, the quotation of a few clauses from a “testimony” passage carries the whole context with it by implication:⁶⁸ this question could be answered with greater assurance here if some details were given of Philip’s application of “this scripture.” Luke certainly knows more of the context than is reproduced here: he cites Isa. 52:13 in Acts 3:13 and Isa. 53:12 in Luke 22:37. But if we pay attention only to the clauses that Luke reproduces, it would be difficult to deduce from them anything but a theology of suffering.

34–35  The Ethiopian’s question, “who is the person about whom the prophet says this? Himself, or someone else?” often serves nowadays as the text for an academic essay or examination question, so numerous are the answers that have been offered.⁶⁹ But Philip found no difficulty, nor did he hesitate between alternative answers. The prophet himself might not have known, but Philip knew, because the prophecy had come true in his day, and so, “beginning at this scripture, he told him the good news about Jesus.” At a time when not one line of any New Testament document had been written, what scripture could any evangelist have used more fittingly as a starting point for presenting the story of Jesus to one who did not know him? It was Jesus, and no other, who offered up his life as a sacrifice for sin, and justified many by bearing their iniquities, exactly as had been written of the obedient Servant. As the historic fact of Jesus’ undeserved suffering and death is certain, equally certain is it that through his suffering and death men and women of all nations have experienced forgiveness and redemption, just as the prophet foretold.⁷⁰

36–38  Philip’s persuasive exposition of the Servant’s passion found its way home to the Ethiopian’s heart. Did Philip also tell him, as Peter had told his Jerusalem audience on the day of Pentecost, that the appropriate response to such good news was repentance and baptism for the remission of sins and the reception of the Holy Spirit? We do not know. At any rate, as they journeyed on, they came to some running water—whether the Wadi el-Hesi northeast of Gaza, which is traditionally pointed out as the place, has been rightly or wrongly identified with it is totally uncertain. “See, here is water!” said the Ethiopian. “What is to prevent my being baptized?”⁷¹ There was nothing to prevent it, so the chariot was halted, they both went down into the water, and Philip baptized him.

This is the account in the original text. But at quite an early date (probably in the second century) an editor felt that this was not adequate. Philip must surely have satisfied himself of the genuineness of the Ethiopian’s faith. (No doubt Philip was well satisfied, but there are some minds which cannot be content to leave such things to be inferred.) So some words were added in which Philip tests the man’s faith, and he responds with a formal confession: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”⁷² The added words of the Western text reflect early Christian practice, to which the Ethiopian is made to conform.⁷³

39  The divine purpose in sending Philip to the Gaza road was accomplished; he was now sped northward by the Spirit on another mission. The Western text, however, makes the angel the Lord snatch Philip away, while the Spirit of the Lord falls on the Ethiopian.⁷⁴ The purpose of this textual alteration may be partly to bring in the angel of the Lord at the end of the episode, since he was active at the beginning of it; but the much more important effect of the longer reading is to make it clear that the Ethiopian’s baptism was followed by the gift of the Spirit. Even with the shorter reading it is a reasonable inference that he did receive the Spirit,⁷⁵ although it would be an impermissible inference in the thinking of those who believe that the Spirit is bestowed only through the imposition of apostolic hands.⁷⁶ When the Ethiopian disappears from our view, continuing joyfully on his way, it need not be doubted that the joy which filled his heart was that “joy in the Holy Spirit” of which Paul speaks in Rom. 14:17.⁷⁷

What became of him we cannot tell. According to Irenaeus, he became a missionary among his own people,⁷⁸ which we should naturally expect—although Irenaeus probably had no more specific information on the matter than we ourselves have. But with the record of his conversion Luke has begun to touch on the evangelization of Gentiles—a subject specially dear to his heart. The Ethiopians were regarded by the Greeks and their neighbors, from Homer’s time onward, as living on the edge of the world.⁷⁹ In Luke’s day interest in them had been quickened by a Roman expedition of A.D. 61–63 which explored the Nile as far up as Meroe and beyond.⁸⁰ So soon after the risen Lord’s commission to his disciples had their witness reached “the end of the earth” (1:8).

40  Philip next appeared at Azotus, the old Philistine city of Ashdod, some twenty miles north of Gaza. From there he headed north along the coastal road, preaching the gospel in all the cities through which he passed,⁸¹ until at last he reached Caesarea.⁸² There he seems to have settled down—at least, it is there that we find him when he makes his next appearance in the narrative, twenty years later (21:8). By that time he had become a family man, with four daughters, each one a prophetess—worthy children of such a father.⁸³

1. See 22:3.

2. Even here there is a parallel between the narratives of Stephen and James. The Ebionite Acts of the Apostles postulated by H. J. Schoeps (see p. 159, n. 127) described how Paul “both planned and mounted a murderous attack on the leader of the church, James the Lord’s brother, and set on foot a bloody pogrom against the Jewish Christians. This account of past events,” Schoeps surmises (Theologie und Geschichte, p. 448), “perhaps comes nearer the truth than the report [of Acts 7:58–8:3].” But the Ebionite portrayal of James is much more likely to be based on the Lukan Stephen than vice versa (see p. 131, n. 7).

3. F. C. Conybeare, “The Stoning of St. Stephen,” Exp. 8,6 (1913), pp. 468–69. The statement that Saul “approved” () of Stephen’s execution need not imply his membership in the Sanhedrin; see on 22:20. where the expression occurs again (p. 419).

4. Gk. . The Western text adds “and tribulation” (), the term employed in 11:19.

5. The Western text adds “who remained in Jerusalem” (which is in any case implied).

6. Mishnah, Sanhedrin 6.6.

7. Gk. , used regularly in the NT of devout Jews (see pp. 53–55, nn. 16, 23 [on 2:5]); here probably Jewish followers of Jesus are meant.

8. Cf. 11:19–20.

9. See M. Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity, E.T. (London, 1979), pp. 74–75. The mention of Mnason in 21:16 (more than twenty years later) shows that not all Hellenistic believers abandoned Jerusalem.

10. That is, until its dispersal c. A.D. 66, and even more so in exile after that. After the Emperor Hadrian refounded Jerusalem in A.D. 135 as the Roman colony of Aelia Capitolina, the church of Jerusalem was a completely Gentile-Christian community, having no continuity with the first-century Jewish-Christian church of Jerusalem.

11. Luke may have seen a theological fitness in their remaining in Jerusalem, as the leaders of the latter-day people of God; cf. G. W. H. Lampe, St. Luke and the Church of Jerusalem (London, 1969), p. 21.

12. See on 9:31 (p. 196).

13. Cf. 9:1–2; 26:10.

14. Gk. , a verb which, according to Lake-Cadbury (ad loc.), refers especially to the ravaging of a body by a wild beast. Paul himself says that he “tried to destroy” the church (Gal. 1:13), using a military term () which denotes the storming of a besieged city (cf. Acts 9:21).

15. Cf. Gal. 1:14.

16. Cf. Gal. 3:13, and see on 5:30 above (pp. 112–13 with n. 40).

17. Gk. , read by C D E byz. The article is added before by P⁷⁴ A B 1175 pc ( has the aberrant reading ). See p. 165.

18. Lit., “many of those who had unclean spirits came out.…”

19. Cf. the epistolary superscriptions in Jas. 1:1 (“To the twelve tribes in the dispersion”) and 1 Pet. 1:1 (“To the exiles of the dispersion”).

20. This work, the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, belongs to the last quarter of the first century.

21. And even in preexilic times, under Hezekiah (2 Chron. 30:1–11) and Josiah (2 Kings 23:21–23).

22. Josephus, Ant. 11.310, 322–24, 346.

23. Josephus, Ant. 13.256. Even after the destruction of their temple, the Samaritans continued to worship on Mount Gerizim (as indeed they still do); cf. John 4:20, where the woman of Sychar says to our Lord, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain.”

24. See on 3:22–23; 7:37.

25. See J. Macdonald, The Theology of the Samaritans (London, 1964), pp. 362–71. It was probably to the Taheb (by whatever name she called him) that the woman of Sychar referred in John 4:25—“when he comes, he will show us all things.”

26. Gk. (cf. 25:21) was used as the equivalent of Lat. Augustus.

27. Justin, First Apology 26.2 (Gitta is commonly identified with modern Jett, c. 11 miles southeast of Caesarea). Justin himself was a native of Samaria, having been born c. A.D. 100 at Flavia Neapolis (modern Nablus, about a mile west of ancient Shechem), founded as a colony by Vespasian in A.D. 72.

28. Cf. J. A. T. Robinson, “The ‘Others’ of John 4:38,” in Twelve New Testament Studies, SBT 34 (London, 1962), pp. 61–66, in which it is argued that the “others” who labored there were John the Baptist and his companions, into whose “labors” the disciples of Jesus now entered. This is in part a reply to O. Cullmann, “Samaria and the Origins of the Christian Mission,” E.T. in The Early Church (London, 1956), pp. 183–92, where it is argued that the “others” were Philip and his helpers, into whose labors the apostles Peter and John subsequently entered (cf. vv. 14–17 below). On Philip’s Samaritan mission see also C. H. H. Scobie, “The Origins and Development of Samaritan Christianity,” NTS 19 (1972–73), pp. 390–414; R. J. Coggins, “The Samaritans and Acts,” NTS 28 (1981–82), pp. 423–34; M. Hengel, Between Jesus and Paul, E.T. (London, 1983), pp. 121–26.

29. See J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism (London, 1913), pp. 182–253.

30. Irenaeus (Against Heresies 1.16) avers that Simon was the source of Gnosticism—of “the knowledge which is falsely so called” (), he says, quoting 1 Tim. 6:20, and that the sect of the Simonians was derived from him. He further tells how Simon had as his consort a woman named Helena, whom he had redeemed from slavery at Tyre, and whom he declared to be the current incarnation of (the thought or conception of the divine mind), from which the angelic powers and the material universe had proceeded. Hippolytus (Refutation of All Heresies 6.2–15) gives a fuller account of Simon’s alleged system, based on a Gnostic work entitled The Great Disclosure (), and relates how he allowed himself to be buried alive in Rome, promising to rise on the third day—but the promise was not fulfilled.

31. At Rome, according to Justin (First Apology 26.2), Simon was honored with a statue dedicated “To Simon the holy god”; but either Justin or the Simonians themselves may have been misled by an inscription beginning SEMONI SANCO DEO, “To the god Semo Sancus,” in honor of an ancient Sabine divinity who safeguarded oaths (cf. CIL 6.567), which they misread as SIMONI SANCTO DEO. Tertullian (Apology 13.9) also connects the statue and inscription with Simon Magus.

32. Cf. F. J. Foakes-Jackson, Peter: Prince of Apostles (London, 1927), pp. 165–82; H.-J. Schoeps, Theologie und Geschichte des Judenchristentums, pp. 127–35; “Simon Magus in der Haggada?” in Aus früstlicher Zeit (Tübingen. 1950), pp. 239–54.

33. By the middle of the third century only a handful of the Simonians survived (Origen, Against Celsus 1.57).

34. Cf. G. Salmon, “Simon Magus,” DCB 4 (London, 1887), pp. 681–88; also ODCC, s.v. “Simon Magus.”

35. Many real or imagined parallels to “the power of God which is called great” () have been adduced. Particularly apposite is the Lydian inscription cited by W. M. Ramsay (BRD, p. 117; cf. New Docs. 3 [1978], §7): (“one God in heaven, heavenly Men, great power of the immortal God”). A feminine counterpart to this acclamation is supplied by a Samaritan inscription in honor of Korē (cf. D. Flusser, “The Great Goddess of Samaria,” IEJ 25 [1975], pp. 13–20, pl. 2; New Docs. 1 [1976], § 68): (“one God, the ruler of all, great Korē [Maiden] the unconquered”). On Simon Magus see also R. P. Casey, “Simon Magus,” in Beginnings I.5, pp. 151–63; A. Ehrhardt, The Framework of the New Testament Stories (Manchester, 1964), pp. 161–64; M. Smith, “The Account of Simon Magus in Acts 8,” H. A. Wolfson Jubilee Volume, II (Jerusalem, 1965), pp. 735–49; K. Beyschlag, “Zur Simon-Magus-Frage,” ZTK 68 (1971), pp. 395–426; Simon Magus und die christliche Gnosis, WUNT 16 (Tübingen, 1974); J. W. Drane, “Simon the Samaritan and the Lucan Concept of Salvation History,” EQ 47 (1975), pp. 131–37; C. K. Barrett, “Light on the Holy Spirit from Simon Magus (Acts 8, 4–25),” in Les Actes des Apotres: Traditions, Redaction, Theologie, ed. J. Kremer, BETL 48 (Leuven, 1979), pp. 281–95.

36. Cf. 1:3 (exposition and notes on pp. 31–33).

37. J. Behm, Die Handauflegung im Urchristentum (Leipzig, 1911), pp. 24–36, envisages two sources in Acts 8:1–25, in the former of which the Samaritans are evangelized by Philip, in the latter by Peter and John; v. 14 being the editorial link between the two.

38. This expression (), repeated in 19:5, differs somewhat from in 2:38; 10:48 (see p. 70 with n. 98). The phrase is common in a commercial context, where some property is transferred or paid “into the name” of someone. So the person baptized “into the name of the Lord Jesus” bears public witness to having passed into the ownership of Jesus, now acknowledged as Lord. The trinitarian formula of Matt. 28:19 (cf. Didachē 7.1) was appropriate for “disciples of all the nations,” turning from paganism to serve the living God, whereas Jews and Samaritans, who already worshiped the one true God, were required only to confess Jesus as Lord (cf. G. F. Moore, Judaism, I [Cambridge, Mass., 1927], pp. 188–89).

39. Cf. N. B. Stonehouse, “The Gift of the Holy Spirit,” WTJ 13 (1950–51), pp. 10–11: “one must recognize the peculiar appropriateness in a volume largely concerned with the external course of early Christian history of centering attention upon the extraordinary miraculous power of the Spirit in the accomplishment of the divine plan for the people of God.”

40. See for this point of view A. J. Mason, The Relation of Confirmation to Baptism (London, 1891); G. Dix, Confirmation or the Laying On of Hands? (London, 1936); The Theology of Confirmation in Relation to Baptism (London, 1946); N. Adler, Taufe und Handauflegung (Münster, 1951); and, for a masterly critique of it, G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit (London, 1951).

41. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit, p. 70.

42. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit, p. 72.

43. A. Ehrhardt, The Acts of the Apostles (Manchester, 1969), p. 47.

44. For “Spirit” (), the reading of B cop^sa, the amplified expression “the Holy Spirit” () appears in P^{45. 74} A C D E Ψ byz lat syr cop^bo.

45. The Western text adds (awkwardly, at the end of the sentence), “who never stopped weeping copiously.”

46. On the other hand, Peter may mean that Simon is heading for a bitter end: “I can see that you are doomed to taste the bitter fruit and wear the fetters of sin” (NEB). The construction (the verb “to be” followed by ) denotes destination in papyri, and has been so used in v. 20 (lit., “may your silver be for perdition,” ). Peter’s language has an OT flavor; cf. Deut. 29:18 (echoed in Heb. 12:15) and Isa. 58:6, noting particularly in LXX of the former text and in LXX of the latter.

47. If Simon had remained within the church, there might have been more plausibility in M. D. Goulder’s diagnosis of Samaritan Gnosticism as one of “the two roots of Christian myth” in The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. J. Hick (London, 1977), pp. 64–86.

48. A. Ehrhardt, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 47.

49. Luke himself, for all his sympathy with Philip’s Hellenistic mission, seems to approve of Peter’s stern reproof of Simon. In his eyes Simon embodies the Hellenistic concept of the, the divinely possessed or divinely illuminated man—the only such person in Acts 8, “and Luke does not approve of him” (C. K. Barrett, “Theologia Crucis—in Acts,” in Theologia Crucis—Signum Crucis, Festschrift für E. Dinkler [Tübingen, 1979], p. 80). See p. 209, n. 33.

50. A. Ehrhardt, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 46.

51. “Your heart is not straight (),” Peter tells him in v. 21 (similarly Ps. 77 [MT 78]:37, LXX).

52. Justin, First Apology 26.6.

53. Gk. . In LXX regularly means “noon” (cf. , 22:6 below), except in Dan. 8:4, 9 where it means “south” (Theodotion renders ). But here “southward” is the more natural sense (but see W. C. van Unnik, “Der Befehl an Philippus,” ZNW 47 [1956], pp. 181–91).

54. P⁴⁵ omits .

55. Here the Western text adds: “And he said to him, ‘If you believe with all your heart, you may.’ He said in answer, ‘I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.’ ” Although this addition is not found in the Byzantine text, it was incorporated by Erasmus in his printed editions; he thought it had been omitted through scribal carelessness. It is printed as v. 37 in KJV, but is properly omitted from the text of The Greek New Testament according to the Majority Text, ed. Z. C. Hodges and A. L. Farstad (Nashville, 1982), where it is mentioned in the apparatus as included in the Received Text.

56. The Western text reads “the Spirit of the Lord fell on the eunuch, and the angel of the Lord snatched Philip away.”

57. Gk. . With this use of the passive of cf. Fr.se trouver.

58. Cf. 1 Kings 18:12; 2 Kings 1:3; 2:16.

59. Cf. p. 140, n. 50; p. 143, n. 58 (on 7:35, 38).

60. Strabo, Geography 16.2.30 ().

61. According to Bion of Soli (Aethiopica 1), “the Ethiopians do not reveal the fathers of their kings, but hand down a tradition that they are sons of the sun. They call the mother of each king Kandakē.” See also Strabo, Geography 17.1.54; Pliny, Natural History 6.186; Dio Cassius, History 54.5.4.

62. Gk. . Cf. Plutarch, Demetrius 25.5: “kings … were generally accustomed to have eunuchs as guardians of the treasury.”

63. Cf. p. 149 with n. 82 (on 7:46).

64. In his Confessions (6.3) Augustine records as something worthy of note that Ambrose of Milan read silently.

65. There is word-play here (), reproduced in the Latin Vulgate, intellegis quae legis?

66. These words are commonly supposed to echo the sense of Isa. 53:10, where the Servant’s life is appointed as a guilt-offering (LXX ); see, on the other hand, M. D. Hooker, Jesus and the Servant (London, 1956), pp. 74–79 et passim; C. K. Barrett, “The Background of Mark 10:45,” in New Testament Essays: Studies in Memory of T. W. Manson, ed. A. J. B. Higgins (Manchester, 1959), pp. 1–18.

67. On the relevance of the designation “the Son of Man” in this setting see M. Black, “Servant of the Lord and Son of Man,” SJT 6 (1953), pp. 1–11. (See pp. 154–55 with nn. 104, 106, on 7:56.)

68. See C. H. Dodd, According to the Scriptures (London, 1952), pp. 88–94.

69. See C. R. North, The Suffering Servant in Deutero-lsaiah (Oxford, 1948), pp. 6–116, for a summary of the answers offered from pre-Christian times to the 1940s, and H. H. Rowley, The Servant of the Lord and Other Essays on the Old Testament (Oxford, ²1965), pp. 3–93, for a survey of answers given since 1921, when S. Mowinckel propounded the view that the prophet did say those things about himself.

70. On the interpretation of the Isaianic Servant Songs, especially the fourth, see also W. Zimmerli and J. Jeremias, TDNT 5, pp. 654–717 (s. v. ); S. R. Driver and A. Neubauer, The Fifty-Third Chapter of Isaiah according to the Jewish Interpreters (Oxford, 1877); G. H. Dalman, Der leidende und der sterbende Messias der Synagoge im ersten nachchristlichen Jahrtausend (Berlin, 1888), and Jesaja 53, das Prophetenwort vom Sühnleiden des Heilsmittlers mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der synagogalen Literatur (Berlin, ²1914); J. J. Brierre-Narbonne, Le Messie souffrant dans la littérature rabbinique (Paris, 1940); H. W. Wolff, Jesaja 53 im Urchristentum (Berlin, 1950); H. W. Robinson, “The Cross of the Servant,” in The Cross in the Old Testament (London, 1955), pp. 55–114; E. Lohmeyer, Gottesknecht und Davidssohn, FRLANT NF 43 (Göttingen, ²1953); A. Bentzen, King and Messiah, E.T. (London, 1955); E. Lohse, Märtyrer und Gottesknecht, FRLANT 64 (Göttingen, 1955); V. de Leeuw, De Ebed Jahweh-Profetieën: Historisch-kritisch Onderzoek naar hun Ontstaan en hun Betekenis (Assen, 1956); E. Fascher, Jesaja 53 in christlicher und jüdischer Sicht (Berlin, 1958); D. J. A. Clines, I, He, We and They, JSOT Sup. 1 (Sheffield, 1976); R. N. Whybray, Thanksgiving for a Liberated Prophet, JSOT Sup. 4 (Sheffield, 1978).

71. Gk. ; From the use of the verb here and in 10:47 (there on the lips of the preacher, not the convert), it has been inferred that it featured in a primitive baptismal formula (cf. also Mark 10:14 and parallels); this is doubtful. See O. Cullmann, Baptism in the New Testament, E.T., SBT 1 (London, 1950), pp. 71–80.

72. See p. 173, n. 55.

73. See p. 418 (on 22:16); also O. Cullmann, The Earliest Christian Confessions, E.T. (London, 1949), pp. 19–20.

74. See p. 174, n. 56. For the action of the Spirit in snatching Philip away cf. the experiences of Elijah (p. 174, n. 58 above) and Ezekiel (Ezek. 3:14; 8:3).

75. Cf. G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit, pp. 43n., 65, 67.

76. See p. 169, n. 40.

77. Cf. Gal. 5:22, where “joy” figures next to “love” in “the fruit of the Spirit.”

78. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.12.10. We have no record of the Ethiopic (Nubian) church earlier than the fourth century. See B. M. Metzger, “The Christianization of Nubia and the Old Nubian Version of the New Testament,” in Historical and Literary Studies, NTTS 8 (Leiden, 1968), pp. 111–22.

79. Homer, Odyssey 1.23 (where the Ethiopians are called , “the last of men”).

80. Cf. Strabo, Geography 17.1.54; Pliny, Natural History 6.35.

81. Including probably Lydda and Joppa, soon afterward visited by Peter (9:32–43).

82. Caesarea was built by Herod the Great on the site of a Phoenician foundation, Strato’s Tower, between Joppa and Dora. It was equipped with a splendid artificial harbor, so that it became the chief port in Herod’s kingdom. He called the new city (completed in 13 B.C.) Caesarea in honor of Caesar Augustus. After A.D. 6 it became the residence of the Roman governors of Judaea, who established their official headquarters in Herod’s praetorium (cf. 23:35). Vespasian was proclaimed emperor there in A.D. 69. After the Jewish war it remained the seat of government of the legate of the imperial province of Judaea, with a new status as a Roman colony (Colonia Flavia Augusta Caesariensis) and exemption from taxation. See Josephus, BJ 1.408–15; 3.409–13; Ant. 15.331–41; 16.136–41. Much of the Herodian and Roman city was extensively excavated from 1959 onward. See L. I. Levine, Caesarea under Roman Rule, SJLA 7 (Leiden, 1975).

83. See pp. 399–401 with nn. 8–10.

ACTS 9

C. CONVERSION OF SAUL OF TARSUS (9:1–31)

1. Saul’s Expedition to Damascus (9:1–2)

1  As for Saul, he continued to breathe out murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples. He went to the high priest

2  and asked him for letters to the synagogues of Damascus, so that, if he found any followers of The Way there, men or women, he might bring them in chains to Jerusalem.

1  The narrative now returns to Saul of Tarsus and his campaign of repression against the believers in Jerusalem, which received passing mention in 8:3. He was not content with driving them from Jerusalem; they must be pursued and rooted out wherever they fled, not only within the frontiers of the land of Israel¹ but beyond them as well. “In the excess of my fury against them,” as he was later to tell the younger Agrippa, “I pursued them even to foreign cities” (26:11). The great paragons of religious zeal in Israel’s history—Phinehas,² Elijah,³ and Mattathias⁴ (father of the Maccabees)—were prepared to go to extremes of violence against the enemies of God, and they were the exemplars on whom Saul modeled himself in his zeal against the church.

2  When the Jewish state won its independence under the Hasmonaean dynasty of ruling priests (142 B.C.), the Romans, who patronized the new state for reasons of their own, required neighboring states to grant it the privileges of a sovereign state, including the right of extradition. A letter delivered at that time by a Roman ambassador to Ptolemy VIII of Egypt concludes with the demand: “If any pestilent men have fled to you from their own country [Judaea], hand them over to Simon the high priest, so that he may punish them according to their law” (1 Macc. 15:21). In 47 B.C. Julius Caesar confirmed those rights and privileges anew to the Jewish nation (although Judaea was no longer a sovereign state), and more particularly to the high-priesthood.⁵ Luke’s narrative implies that the right of extradition continued to be enjoyed by the high priest under the provincial administration set up in A.D. 6. The followers of The Way whom Saul was authorized to bring back from Damascus were refugees from Jerusalem, not native Damascene disciples. The charge against them may have been complicity in Stephen’s offense against the temple.

“The Way” is a designation for the new movement used several times in Acts (19:9, 23; 22:4; 24:14, 22; cf. also 16:17; 18:25–26). It was evidently a term used by the early followers of Jesus to denote their movement as the way of life or the way of salvation. Similar words are used in a religious sense elsewhere; a specially close parallel is the use of the Hebrew word for “way” in the Zadokite Work and other documents of the Qumran community to denote the membership and life-style of that community.⁶

The history of Damascus goes back to remote antiquity. It was a city in the days of Abraham, and at the time of the Israelite monarchy it was the capital of the most important Aramaean kingdom. Later it was the seat of administration of an Assyrian province. In Hellenistic times it was cornpletely replanned, on the Hippodamian grid-system. From 64 B.C. on it belonged to the Roman province of Syria, but had a measure of municipal autonomy in the loose federation of cities called the Decapolis. There was a very large Jewish population in the city,⁷ so it is not surprising that there were several synagogues, each exercising disciplinary supervision over its members.

2. The Light and Voice from Heaven (9:3–7)

3  As he went on his way he was approaching Damascus when suddenly a light from heaven flashed round about him.

4  He fell to the ground, and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”⁸

5  “Who are you, my lord?” he asked. The other said,⁹ “I am Jesus,¹⁰ the one you are persecuting.”¹¹

6  But get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.”

7  The men who were traveling with him stood speechless; they heard the voice but did not see anyone.¹²

3–6  Armed with the high priest’s commission, Saul set out for Damascus, and had almost reached it when the momentous event took place. About midday¹³ a light which outshone the sun flashed round him, and as he lay on the ground to which he had fallen, a voice sounded in his ears, addressing him in Aramaic:¹⁴ “Saul! Saul! why are you persecuting me?”¹⁵

The voice which he heard, as far as literary parallels are concerned, may be recognized as the phenomenon known to the rabbis as , “the daughter of the voice [of God],” the heavenly echo. In the latter days, they believed, when there were no more prophets to hear the direct voice of God, the echo of his voice might still occasionally be heard by some. The solemn repetition of the name of the person addressed is common in divine allocutions.¹⁶ Saul probably discerned a divine quality about the voice as it spoke to him; hence “Who are you, my lord?” may be a better rendering of his response than “Who are you, sir?” But he was not prepared for the reply to his question: the one who spoke to him was Jesus, once crucified but now the heavenly Lord—the one whom he was zealously persecuting in the person of his followers.

Any attempt to explain Saul’s Damascus-road experience in medical terms must reckon with its revolutionary and long-term effects. The extraordinary enhancement of illumination experienced by epileptics, as described (for example) by Dostoyevsky,¹⁷ is a very different matter from a total conversion such as Saul underwent—a conversion of will, intellect, and emotion, which dictated the abiding purpose and direction of his subsequent life and activity. That the illumination was inward as well as external appears from his own language about the transition from unbelief to faith—“seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.… For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4, 6).

That Saul actually saw the risen Christ in addition to hearing his voice is not expressly stated in the conversion narrative itself, but is confirmed below in the words of Ananias (v. 17) and Barnabas (v. 27).¹⁸ His own references to his conversion imply incidentally that he heard the voice of Christ but emphasize above all that he saw him as the risen and glorified one.¹⁹ There are affinities between his conversion experience and Ezekiel’s inaugural vision, in which the prophet saw the “likeness” of the heavenly throne and above it “a likeness as it were of a human form” (Ezek. 1:26)²⁰, but for Saul the one who bore a human form identified himself as a historical person: “I am Jesus.” Few of Saul’s distinctive insights into the significance of the gospel cannot be traced back to the Damascus-road event, or to the outworking of that event in his life and thought.²¹

As truly as Jesus the crucified one had appeared “alive after his passion” to Peter, James, and others on the first Christian Easter morning and the days that followed, so truly now, “as to one untimely born,” did he appear to Saul (1 Cor. 15:5–8). His fellow-travelers (according to 22:9) saw the light that flashed so suddenly around them, but for them it was not accompanied by that blinding illumination within which wrought the revolution in the persecuting zealot, and diverted his zeal to the propagation of the faith which up to that moment he had endeavored to destroy.

Saul’s own account of his experience is not only adequate to the sequel: it is in character with it too. The more one studies it, the more one is driven to agree with the eighteenth-century statesman George Lyttelton, that “the conversion and apostleship of St. Paul alone, duly considered, was of itself a demonstration sufficient to prove Christianity to be a divine revelation.”²²

A striking modern parallel to the narrative is Sundar Singh’s story of his own conversion after a period of bitter hostility to the gospel. Praying in his room in the early morning of December 18, 1904, he saw a great light. “Then as I prayed and looked into the light, I saw the form of the Lord Jesus Christ. It had such an appearance of glory and love. If it had been some Hindu incarnation I would have prostrated myself before it. But it was the Lord Jesus Christ whom I had been insulting a few days before. I felt that a vision like this could not come out of my own imagination. I heard a voice saying in Hindustani, ‘How long will you persecute me? I have come to save you; you were praying to know the right way. Why do you not take it?’ The thought then came to me, ‘Jesus Christ is not dead but living and it must be He Himself.’ So I fell at His feet and got this wonderful Peace which I could not get anywhere else. This is the joy I was wishing to get. When I got up, the vision had all disappeared, but although the vision disappeared the Peace and Joy have remained with me ever since.”²³ Several circumstances make it difficult to set down this experience as a dream or as the effect of self-hypnotism; it is also interesting to be told that, to the best of his remembrance, “at that time he did not know the story of St. Paul’s conversion; though, of course, on a point of that kind the human memory cannot be implicitly relied on”²⁴ (and even if he did not know the story at the time of his conversion, he knew it by the time he related his conversion in the words just quoted, and it may have influenced the wording of his narrative). Here too we cannot properly evaluate the Sadhu’s account of his experience without taking into consideration the remarkable life which was its sequel and the exceptional signs that attended his ministry.²⁵

7  The statement that Saul’s fellow-travelers “stood speechless; they heard the voice, but did not see anyone,” has sometimes been thought to conflict with his own statement, “we had all fallen to the ground” (26:14), and still more with his statement that the men who were with him “did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me” (22:9). The first discrepancy is immaterial: presumably the others were able to get up while Saul remained lying on the ground. As for the other discrepancy, Chrysostom’s explanation that the voice heard by the fellow-travelers was Saul’s voice talking to the risen Lord²⁶ runs up against the difficulty that “the voice” in verse 7 is most naturally taken as referring back to the “voice” of verse 4. The more usual explanation is that, while the others heard a sound (like the crowd in John 12:29 which “said that it had thundered” when Jesus’ prayer was answered by a heavenly voice), they did not distinguish an articulate voice.²⁷

It is not made clear whether Saul’s companions happened to be traveling in the same caravan, or had actually set out with him to attend him on his mission.²⁸ Since he was commissioned to bring the refugees in chains to Jerusalem, he would naturally have required the help of others (perhaps members of the temple police) to round them up and take them back.

3. Saul Enters Damascus (9:8–9)

8  Saul got up from the ground, but when his eyes were opened he saw nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.

9  He remained without sight for three days, and neither ate nor drank.

8–9  At last Saul was able to rise from the ground, and when he did so, he was unable to see, “blinded by excess of light.” His companions therefore took him by the hand and led him through the gate of Damascus to the place where, presumably, arrangements had been made for him to stay. There he stayed for three days, taking neither food nor drink. (There is no need to regard his abstinence as an early instance of fasting before baptism;²⁹ it was probably the result of shock.)

4. Ananias Sent to Saul (9:10–16)

10  In Damascus there was a disciple named Ananias. To him the Lord said in a vision, “Ananias!” “Here I am, Lord,” he replied.

11  The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and ask at the house of Judas for a man of Tarsus, named Saul. For, I tell you, he is praying

12  and has seen [in a vision]³⁰ a man called Ananias coming in and placing his hands on him, so that he may recover his sight.”

13  But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard about this man from many people—about all the harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem.

14  And here he has authority from the chief priests to throw into chains all who call on your name.”

15  “Be on your way,” said the Lord to him; “this man is a chosen instrument for me, to bear my name before Gentiles and kings and Israelites.

16  I am going to show him all that he must suffer for the sake of my name.”

10–12  Toward the end of these three days, Saul, as he was praying, received a further vision, in which a man named Ananias came to him and laid his hands on him, with the result that his sight was restored. This Ananias turned out to be a real person, a man of Damascus who was a disciple of Jesus, although he was evidently not one of the fugitives from the persecution in Jerusalem.³¹ It appears that the gospel had already made its way independently to Damascus—possibly from its northern base in Galilee. Ananias knew, however, about the persecution in Jerusalem which had dispersed so many of the believers in that city, and he knew of the leading part that Saul had played in it. He knew, too, that Saul had come to Damascus with authority to arrest believers from Jerusalem who had fled there for refuge.³²

We may judge of Ananias’s astonishment, then, when he in his turn received directions from the risen Christ³³ in a vision to go to the place where Saul was staying and lay his hands on him for the restoration of his sight. The “street called Straight,” where Saul’s host lived, is still one of the chief thoroughfares of Damascus, the Darb al-Mustaqim. The traditional location of the house of Judas is near its western end.

13–14  “Lord,” said Ananias, as he received these instructions, “I have heard about this man from many people.” He had not had any personal experience of Saul’s harrying of the disciples, but those who could speak from firsthand knowledge had told him of Saul’s activity, and the news of his coming to Damascus to prosecute his grim work there had reached the city before Saul himself arrived. When Ananias, in his reply to the Lord, spoke of “all who call on your name,” he referred to the followers of Jesus, those who confessed him as Lord.³⁴ The background of the expression is to be found in Joel 2:32, “everyone who invokes the Lord’s name will be saved,” quoted by Peter on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:21).

15  But Ananias’s protest was overruled: the risen Lord had his eye on the man of Tarsus and had a great work for him to perform. In spite of his recent record as a persecutor, Saul was a chosen instrument³⁵ in the Lord’s hand, a messenger who would spread the good news in Jesus’ name more widely than anyone else. The Gentiles and their rulers, not only the people of Israel, would hear the proclamation of salvation from his lips. While Paul says that the revelation of God’s Son which he received on the Damascus road was given in order that he might “proclaim him among the Gentiles” (Gal. 1:16), Luke consistently includes Jews among the beneficiaries of his ministry, in recognition of the fact that he did preach to Jews, as he was shortly to do in the synagogues of Damascus (v. 20), and numbered Jewish believers among his converts.

16  Moreover, Ananias was assured that, if Saul himself had inflicted suffering on those who believed in Jesus, he in his turn would have much suffering to endure for the sake of Jesus’ name.³⁶

5. Ananias Visits Saul (9:17–19a)

17  Ananias went off, entered the house, and placed his hands on him. “Brother Saul,” he said, “the Lord—that is, Jesus, who appeared to you on the road by which you came—has sent me so that you may recover your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

18  Immediately a scaly substance fell away from his eyes; he recovered his sight,³⁷ got up, and was baptized.

19a  Then he took food and his strength was restored.

17  Ananias obediently made his way to the street called Straight, and entered the house of Judas. There, without delay, he fulfilled his commission, laying his hands on the blind man and addressing him in terms of brotherly friendship. The form of the name “Saul” in the original text at this point—the same form as was used by the heavenly voice which Saul heard on the way³⁸—suggests that Ananias spoke in Aramaic.

In his later speech to the Jerusalem populace from the top of the steps connecting the temple precincts with the Antonia fortress (22:14–16) Paul gives a fuller account of what Ananias said to him; in his speech before Agrippa (26:16–18) he includes Ananias’s communication in what was said to him during the heavenly vision. In the present narrative, too, it is plain that the Damascus-road vision and the message of Ananias were mutually confirmatory; by this twofold communication Saul received his commission from the Lord.

In writing to the Galatians Paul is at pains to deny, in the most unqualified terms, that he received his apostolic commission from any mortal man, or through any mortal man: he received it, he asserts, immediately from the Christ who was revealed to him as God’s Son (Gal. 1:1, 11–20). How does this square with the part ascribed to Ananias in Acts?

In the first place, Paul in Galatians is answering the charge that he was dependent, for such missionary authority as he might possess, on the apostles in Jerusalem. The part played by Ananias could not have affected the argument one way or the other. A private disciple like Ananias could not in any case have had the power to commission him. In the second place, Ananias for this special purpose occupied such an exalted status that his words to Saul were the words of the risen Christ. Having been sent by the risen Christ to lay his hands on Saul, he was on this particular occasion his agent and indeed his mouthpiece—Luke would not have called him an apostle but the designation would not be inappropriate.³⁹ Whether he is called an apostle or not, he was certainly a duly authorized prophet. It was as the spokesman of Christ that he went to Saul; he had nothing to say beyond the words that the Lord put in his mouth. Ananias uttered the words, but as he did so, it was Christ himself who commissioned Saul to be his ambassador. Ananias laid his hands on Saul, but it was the power of Christ that in the same moment enlightened his eyes and filled him with the Holy Spirit. That Saul should have received the filling of the Spirit through the imposition of the hands of such an obscure disciple as Ananias shows clearly that Luke did not reckon the imposition of apostolic hands to be necessary for this (in his understanding of the term “apostolic”).⁴⁰ Such filling was the indispensable qualification for the prophetic ministry mapped out for Saul in the Lord’s words of verse 15—a ministry comparable to that to which Jeremiah was called in his day (Jer. 1:5). Henceforth Saul discharged this ministry as one endowed with heavenly power (cf. v. 22).

The commissioning of Saul, and the part played in it by Ananias, must ever remain a stumbling block in the path of those whose conception of the apostolic ministry is too tightly bound to one particular line of transmission or form of ordination. If the risen Lord commissioned such an illustrious servant in so “irregular” a way, may he not have done so again, and may he not yet do so again, when the occasion requires it?

So Ananias enters and leaves the narrative, and we know nothing more of him. But as Saul’s first friend after his conversion, the first follower of Jesus to greet him as a brother, as well as the one who faithfully bore the Lord’s commission to him, Ananias has an honored place in sacred history, and a special claim on the gratitude of all who in one way or another have entered into the blessing that stems from the life and work of the apostle to the Gentiles.

18–19a  When Ananias had executed his commission and laid his hands on Saul, a flaky substance fell away from Saul’s eyes.⁴¹ He was able to see again; he rose up and was baptized forthwith in the name of Jesus (receiving his baptism at the hands of Ananias, we should naturally suppose);⁴² he ate food for the first time in three days and a return of bodily strength accompanied the influx of new spiritual power.

6. Saul Preaches in Damascus (9:19b–22)

19b  He stayed for some days⁴³ with the disciples in Damascus,

20  and without delay he began to preach Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is⁴⁴ the Son of God.”

21  All who heard him were amazed. “Is not this the man,” they asked, “who has devastated in Jerusalem those who call on this name? Has he not come here for the very purpose of taking them in chains to the chief priests?”

22  But Saul’s power went on increasing⁴⁵ and he confounded the Jews who were resident in Damascus as he proved that this Jesus was the Messiah.⁴⁶

19b–20 According to the autobiographical outline supplied by Paul in Gal. 1:15–17, he did not confer with any human being after receiving his “revelation of Jesus Christ” but went away to Arabia (the Nabataean kingdom, which lay on the eastern frontier of Syria and stretched south to the Red Sea). This need not exclude a short period of such witness in Damascus as is described here—either before he set out for Arabia (which seems more probable) or after his return to Damascus (“without delay” in v. 20 need not be pressed overmuch, especially since Luke has nothing at all to say of the visit to Arabia).

It is more significant than might be supposed at first glance that the only occurrence of the title “Son of God” in Acts should be in this report of Saul’s early preaching.⁴⁷ It was as the Son of God that Christ was revealed to him on the Damascus road (Gal. 1:16; cf. 2 Cor. 1:19; Rom. 1:4).

This title, or its equivalent, is used in the Old Testament (1) of the people of Israel (Ex. 4:22; Hos. 11:1), (2) of the anointed king of Israel (2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 89:26–27), and therefore (3) of the ideal king of the future, the Messiah of David’s line (see especially Ps. 2:7 as quoted below in 13:33; cf. also above, 2:25–26). For the messianic use of the title in the pseudepigrapha cf. 1 Enoch 105:2; 4 Ezra 7:28–29; 13:32, 37, 52; 14:9. That our Lord’s contemporaries believed the Messiah to be in some special sense the son of God is rendered probable by the wording of the high priest’s question to him at his trial: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” (Mark 14:61 par. Matt. 26:63; Luke 22:67, 70). As applied to our Lord, then, the title “Son of God” marks him out as the true representative of the Israel of God and as God’s anointed king; but it is no merely official title. As he himself understood the heavenly voice which said to him at his baptism, “You are my Son” (Mark 1:11 par. Luke 3:22), it expressed his unique relationship and fellowship with the Father.⁴⁸ A. E. Harvey finds three aspects of sonship implicit in the ascription of the title to Jesus: his perfect obedience to God, his being the ultimate revealer of God, and his being the authorized agent of God.⁴⁹ The proclamation of Jesus as the Son of God represents an advance on the way in which his messiahship has been proclaimed thus far in Acts.

21–22  It was to the synagogues of Damascus that Saul had been sent with the commission from the high priest, and to the synagogues of Damascus he went. But instead of presenting his letters of credence and demanding the extradition of the disciples of Jesus, he appeared as the bearer of a very different commission, issued by a higher authority than the high priest’s, and as a disciple and messenger of Jesus he announced his Master’s claims. No wonder that his hearers were amazed by the change that had come over him. The news of his mission had not been kept secret: here was the man whose arrival they had expected, but far from arresting the disciples of Jesus he was confounding the Jews of Damascus by his argument that the disciples’ witness was true: Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God.⁵⁰ The filling of the Spirit which he had received gave his words a demonstrative power which could not be confuted: as with Stephen at an earlier date, so now with Saul, his hearers “could not resist the wisdom and spirit with which he spoke” (6:10).

7. Saul Escapes from Damascus (9:23–25)

23  When many days had elapsed, the Jews plotted to kill him;

24  but Saul learned of their plot. They actually guarded the gates by day and by night in order to kill him,

25  but his disciples took him and let him down through the wall by night, lowering him in a basket.

23–25  With the adventure thus recorded by Luke must be compared Paul’s account in 2 Cor. 11:32–33: “In Damascus the ethnarch of King Aretas was guarding the city of the Damascenes in order to seize me, but I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall, and escaped his hands.” Aretas IV (9 B.C.–A.D. 40) was ruler of the Nabataean kingdom in which Saul spent some time after his conversion (Gal. 1:17). It is commonly supposed that Paul’s sojourn in Arabia had the nature of a religious retreat: that he sought the solitude of the desert—perhaps even going to Mount Horeb as Moses and Elijah had done—in order to commune with God and think out all the implications of his new life, without disturbance. But the context in which he tells of his going to Arabia, immediately after receiving his commission to proclaim Christ among the Gentiles, suggests that he went there to preach the gospel.⁵¹ The hostile interest which the Nabataean authorities took in him implies that he had done something to annoy them—something more than withdrawal to the desert for solitary contemplation. The ethnarch looked after the interests of the many Nabataean subjects who lived in Damascus, and in general acted as King Aretas’s representative in the city.⁵² Whatever part the local Jews had in the plot, Paul avoids saying anything to the detriment of his own people, but one possibility is that, knowing of the official Nabataean animosity toward him, they advised the ethnarch of his whereabouts, so that he might arrest him as he left the city and take him back to be dealt with by the Nabataean authorities.⁵³ However, while Saul’s enemies were watching the city gates to catch him, some of his new friends and sympathizers got him safely away.⁵⁴ One of them had a house built on to the city wall, and he was lowered in a large basket or net⁵⁵ through a window of the house, which was actually cut in the city wall.

Luke says that this incident took place “when many days had elapsed”; Paul, more definitely, says in Gal. 1:18 that it was three years after his conversion (by inclusive reckoning, no doubt) that he went up to Jerusalem—and from the narrative of Acts he seems to have gone to Jerusalem immediately after his escape from Damascus.

8. Saul in Jerusalem; He Is Sent to Tarsus (9:26–30)

26  When he arrived in Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples. But they were all afraid of him; they could not believe that he was a disciple.

27  But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and told them how he had seen the Lord on the road, and what he had said to him, and how he had preached boldly at Damascus in the name of Jesus.

28  So he stayed with them in Jerusalem, coming in and going out,

29  and preached boldly in the Lord’s name. He also spoke to the Hellenists⁵⁶ and debated with them, but they tried to kill him.

30  When the brothers learned of this, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.

26  When Saul returned to Jerusalem, he was in a difficult position. His old associates knew all about his defection, and he could expect no friendly welcome from them. On the other hand, the disciples of Jesus, with whom he now wished to associate himself, had not forgotten his campaign of persecution. One can scarcely feel surprise at their suspicion when he made overtures to them. The role of the agent provocateur was as familiar in antiquity as in more recent times; what assurance had they that this was not a scheme of Saul’s to gain their confidence for their more effective undoing?

27  It was Barnabas who, true to his name, acted as Saul’s sponsor and encouraged them to receive him. It is possible that Barnabas was already acquainted with Saul, knew his integrity of character, and was convinced of the genuineness of his conversion.⁵⁷ When Saul desperately needed a true friend in Damascus, Ananias played that part to him; now, when he stood in equal need of one in Jerusalem, he found a friend in Barnabas. And Barnabas’s prestige with the apostles and other believers in Jerusalem was such that when he gave them his guarantee that Saul was now a true disciple of Jesus, they were reassured.

When Luke says that Barnabas brought Saul “to the apostles,” the narrative of Gal. 1:18–20 compels us to interpret this as a generalizing plural. According to Paul’s own solemn affirmation, the only leaders of the Jerusalem church whom he met on that occasion were Peter (Cephas) and James the Lord’s brother (whom Paul calls an apostle, although he would not have satisfied Luke’s conditions for that designation).

28–30  With Luke’s account here the whole passage in Gal. 1:18–24 must be compared: “Next, after three years I went up to Jerusalem to get to know⁵⁸ Cephas, and stayed with him for fifteen days. But I saw none of the other apostles, except James, the Lord’s brother. I assure you, in what I am writing to you, as God is my witness, I am telling no lie. Then I came into the territories of Syria and Cilicia. I remained unknown by face to the churches of Judaea which are in Christ; they only kept on hearing, ‘Our former persecutor is now preaching the faith which he once tried to devastate,’ and they glorified God on my account.” The emphasis with which Paul affirms the truth of this account suggests that he knew of another account, which may have come to the ears of his Galatian converts, and which he is anxious to refute. It has indeed been argued that this rival account is the one on which Luke draws here,⁵⁹ but this is quite improbable.

Paul’s chief concern in this section of Galatians is to show that he received his gospel, and his commission to preach it, without human mediation—in particular, that he was in no way indebted to the Jerusalem authorities. He had started fulfilling his commission (in Arabia) before he had any contact with Jerusalem, and when in due course he went up to Jerusalem, it was for a short private visit. Luke may generalize and say that he saw the apostles, but for Paul it was important to particularize and say which apostles he actually met. But Luke’s generalizing report does not suggest at all that “the apostles” to whom Barnabas introduced Saul conferred any authority on him.

It is not so easy to reconcile Luke’s description of Saul’s public activity at Jerusalem in association with the apostles with the statement in Gal. 1:22 that, until the time of his departure for Syria and Cilicia (and after that), he “remained unknown by face to the churches of Judaea,” which knew of him only by hearsay. One commentator removes the phrase “in Jerusalem” from verse 28 (taking it to be a gloss) and regards verses 28 and 29 as a continuation of Barnabas’s description of Saul’s activity at Damascus. Verse 30 would then go on: “And the brothers recognized him⁶⁰ (that is, as a disciple) and brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.” Thus, we are assured, “the whole difficulty vanishes.”⁶¹ It does not, and even if it did vanish, one must have reservations about an emendation, however ingenious it may be, which is proposed not because it has any textual attestation but because its adoption will help to remove a discrepancy. It is true that there is a marked resemblance between the account of Paul’s activity at Damascus (his bold preaching and the consequent plot against his life) and that of his activity in Jerusalem. Luke’s sources probably supplied him with little detail about the Jerusalem visit; hence the generalizing terms in which he reports it.

He describes Saul, during his Jerusalem visit, as taking up the work which Stephen had laid down at his death, by engaging in debates with the Hellenists.⁶² Their reaction was swift and violent. Saul was worse than Stephen: he was in their eyes a traitor to the true cause, and by his volte-face he had let down those who formerly followed him loyally as their leader in the suppression of the new movement. With the information given here we have somehow to combine Saul’s account (reproduced at a later point, in 22:17–21) of Jesus’ appearing to him in the temple and telling him to leave Jerusalem because his witness would not be listened to. He protested that he was a specially valuable witness because the people of Jerusalem knew his earlier record as a persecutor and his approval of Stephen’s death. But the Lord repeated his command to him to depart from Jerusalem, adding that he would send him to the Gentiles.⁶³

Jerusalem was too hot to hold Saul. His friends saved his life by getting him safely away to Caesarea, where they put him on board a ship bound for his native Tarsus. Thus, as he says himself, he “came into the territories of Syria and Cilicia” (Gal. 1:21). Syria and Cilicia at this time formed a united imperial province.⁶⁴ Tarsus, the chief city of Cilicia, was now about a thousand years old. It had been subject, from time to time, to the Assyrians, Persians, and Graeco-Macedonians. It passed under Roman control in 64 B.C., but retained its autonomy as a free city. Under Augustus the administration of the city was entrusted to his former teacher, Athenodorus the Stoic, himself a native of Tarsus, who appears to have established a property qualification for its citizens.⁶⁵ Tarsus was a leading center of culture, with schools devoted to philosophy, rhetoric, and law, although they did not have the international standing of the schools of Athens and Alexandria.⁶⁶ It is unwise, however, to exaggerate the influence which the educational system of Tarsus exercised on its most illustrious son.⁶⁷

There, then, we leave Saul for some time, engaged in unchronicled evangelization; we meet him again in 11:25.

9. The Church Enjoys Peace and Prosperity (9:31)

31  So the church⁶⁸ throughout all Judaea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and continued to be built up and to increase, as it conducted itself in the fear of the Lord and the encouragement of the Holy Spirit.

31  Luke uses the singular “church” here where Paul prefers to use the plural and to speak of “the churches of Judaea” (Gal. 1:22; cf. 1 Thess. 2:14). It was, in fact, the original Jerusalem church, now dispersed and decentralized. “The Ecclesia,” said F. J. A. Hort, “was still confined to Jewish or semi-Jewish populations and to ancient Jewish soil; but it was no longer the Ecclesia of a single city, and yet it was one: probably as corresponding, by these three modern representative districts of Judaea, Galilee and Samaria, to the ancient Ecclesia which had its home in the whole land of Israel.”⁶⁹

With this summary of progress Luke’s narrative of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus comes to an end. The persecution that broke out after Stephen’s death died out with the conversion and departure of the leading persecutor. But such is the importance attached by Luke to this event that, in spite of limitations on the space at his disposal, he records it in some detail on two later occasions, on both of which the story is told by Paul in the first person—once to the hostile crowd from which he had just been rescued in the temple precincts (22:1–21), and once in his apologia before the younger Agrippa (26:2–29).⁷⁰

With Luke’s estimate of the importance of Saul’s conversion neither the historian nor the theologian can quarrel. The spread of Christianity in the Roman Empire cannot be imagined apart from his work. He was indeed a chosen instrument in the hand of the risen Lord, fitted for his life-work before his conversion—set apart for it indeed, as he acknowledges, before his birth (Gal. 1:15). Born a “Hebrew” son of “Hebrew” parents,⁷¹ and given the best education in his ancestral traditions that contemporary Judaism could provide,⁷² he also inherited the rare privilege of Roman citizenship, while his debt to Hellenistic culture is plain to every reader of his letters. When in due course God “revealed his Son” in Saul of Tarsus, he devoted all this wealthy inheritance, together with his rare natural qualities, to the task of Gentile evangelization; and, latecomer though he was among the apostles, he “worked harder than any of them, though [he added] it was not I, but the grace of God which is with me” (1 Cor. 15:10).

1. The land of Israel at this time consisted in the main of the Roman province of Judaea (which included Samaria) and Herod Antipas’s tetrarchy of Galilee and Peraea.

2. Num. 25:7–13; Ps. 106:30–31.

3. 1 Kings 18:40; 19:10, 14.

4. 1 Macc. 2:23–28.

5. Josephus,. Ant. 14.192–95; see S. Safrai and M. Stern (ed.), The Jewish People in the First Century, I (Assen, 1974), p. 456.

6. CD 1.13; 2.6; 1QS 9.17–18; 10.20–21; see E. Repo, Der “Weg” als Selbstbezeichnung des Urchristentums, AASF B 132.2 (Helsinki, 1964). The Zadokite Work, discovered toward the end of the nineteenth century in two mutilated manuscripts in the ancient synagogue of Fostat (Old Cairo), and first published in Fragments of a Zadokite Work, ed. S. Schechter, I (Cambridge, 1910), revealed the presence in Damascus of a Jewish group (now known to have been closely related to, if not identical with, the Qumran community) bound together by covenant as a new and purified Israel, devoted to the Zadokite priesthood and a distinctive form of the messianic hope. See L. Ginzberg, An Unknown Jewish Sect (New York, 1976); P. R. Davies, The Damascus Covenant, JSOT Sup. 25 (Sheffield, 1983); also G. Vermes. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English (Harmondsworth, ²1975), pp. 95–117. If the “Damascus” of this document is to be understood literally, it may be asked what relation the covenanters of Damascus bore to the local disciples of Jesus, but it is probably impossible to answer the question with anything like certainty.

7. According to Josephus, BJ 2.561, the outbreak of the Judaean revolt in A.D. 66 was marked by the massacre of 10,500 Damascene Jews; in BJ 7.368, their number has risen to 18,000.

8. The Western addition, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads,” is in two Greek MSS and some Latin and Syriac witnesses transferred here from v. 5 (see n. 11 below) in order to harmonize with 26:14.

9. The Byzantine text reads “The Lord said.”

10. A few authorities, mainly Western in character, add “the Nazarene” from 22:8.

11. There is a Western addition here (drawn in part from 22:10 and 26:14): “it is hard for you to kick against the goads. And he, trembling and astonished, said, ‘Lord, what will you have me to do?’ And the Lord said to him” (the conjunction “but” at the beginning of v. 6 is consequently omitted). This addition occurs in no extant Greek MS, but is found in some Old Latin and Vulgate codices, and also in part as an asterisked reading in the Harclean Syriac. Erasmus, considering that the words had been accidentally lost from the Greek text, translated them back into the Greek NT; they thus formed part of the “Received Text” and so of KJV.

12. There is a Western addition, preserved only in the Old Latin codex h; “when he spoke. But he said to them, ‘Raise me up from the earth’ ” (the opening words of v. 8 run accordingly: “And when they had raised him up …”).

13. So 22:6; 26:13.

14. “In the Hebrew speech,” says Paul in 26:14 (see p. 466, n. 24). Except in the Apocalypse, the “Hebrew” language in the NT regularly means Aramaic. G. H. Dalman reconstructs the Aramaic wording as ’ (Jesus-Jeshua, E.T. [London, 1929], p. 18). Was Aramaic spoken because it was Jesus’ mother tongue or because it was Saul’s mother tongue?

15. As Augustine put it, “it was the head in heaven crying out on behalf of the members that were still on earth” (Sermon 279.1).

16. Cf. Dalman, Jesus-Jeshua. p. 18.

17. See F. Dostoyevsky,The Idiot, E.T. (London, 1913), pp.224–25; also the discussion in J. Klausner, From Jusus to Paul, E.T.(London,1944), pp. 326–30.

18. Cf.22:14; 26:16.

19. Cf. 1 Cor. 9:1; 15:8; Gal. 1:16.

20. Cf. C. Rowland, “The Influenence of the First Chapter of Ezekiel on Jewish and Early Christian Literature” (diss. Cambridge, 1974); The Open Heaven(London, 1982), pp.84–85, 95–96, et passim.

21. Cf. S. Kim, The Origin of Paul’s Gospel(Tübingen/Grand Rapids, ²1984).

22. G. Lyttelton, Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul (London, 1747), paragraph 1, “a treatise,” wrote Samuel Johnson, “to which infidelity has never been able to fabricate a specious answer” (Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets [London, 1779–81]).

23. B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy, The Sadhu (London, 1921), pp. 6–8. It is of interest that the voice addressed him in Hindustani and not in English.

24. Streeter and Appasamy, The Sadhu. p. 8.

25. See pp. 236–37 below (on 12:10–11).

26. Chrysostom, Homilies on Acts 47.

27. So J. H. Moulton, MHT I, p. 66. But his appeal to “an old and well-known distinction between the acc. and the gen. with ” (contrast in 22:9 with here) is not supported by Lukan usage; see R. G. Bratcher, “ in Acts ix.7 and xxii.9,” ExT 71 (1959–60), p. 243.

28. They are called his , “those who were in the caravan with him” (cf. , Luke 2:44).

29. The practice of fasting before Christian baptism is first attested in Didachē 7.4 and then in Justin, First Apology 61.2.

30. The phrase “in a vision” () is added in B and C, with the Byzantine text. Even if it is not part of the original text, it is exegetically true.

31. This may be inferred from the fuller account of Ananias and his character in 22:12.

32. The use of rather than in (22:5) implies that Saul went to Damascus to arrest those who had fled thither, not those who were regularly resident there (who would in any case not have been covered by his letters of extradition).

33. That “the Lord” in v. 10 is the risen Christ is evident from v. 17.

34. “All who call on your name” are the same as those called “your saints” in v. 13. “Saints” () is a common designation of Christians in the NT, especially in the Pauline letters; it denotes them as the people of God or Christ, set apart for him and his service.

35. For Paul’s own sense of his election for special service see Rom. 1:1, 5; Gal. 1:15–16; Eph. 3:7–13.

36. On “suffering for the name” cf. 5:41; 21:13. Paul’s own commentary on these words may be found in 2 Cor. 11:23–27. In the kingdom of Christ suffering for his sake is a token of his favor and an earnest of his reward (cf. 14:22; Matt. 5:11–12; Rom. 8:17; Phil. 1:29–30; 2 Thess. 1:5–8; 2 Tim. 2:12).

37. Several witnesses (C² E L 614 pm ) add “immediately” ().

38. The form is used in the vocative by the Lord (v. 4 par. 22:7 and 26:14) and by Ananias (here and in 22:13); it is used in the accusative of King Saul in 13:21. Otherwise in Acts the hellenized form is used.

39. Cf. G. W. H. Lampe, The Seal of the Spirit ( London, 1951), p. 72: “Ananias … is, for the purpose of meeting Paul, a duly commissioned Apostle.”

40. For Luke’s understanding of the terms “apostle” and “apostolic” see p. 30 (on 1:2).

41. Cf. Tob. 3:17 (“to scale away the white films from Tobit’s eyes”); 11:13 (“the white films scaled away from the corners of his eyes”).

42. See p. 418 with n. 22 (on 22:16). Saul’s baptism may, like that of Cornelius and his household in 10:44–48, have followed his reception of the Spirit; this cannot be determined with certainty from the narrative.

43. Gk. for which P⁴⁵ reads , “many days” (cf. vv. 23, 43).

44. Some Western authorities insert “the Christ.”

45. Some Western authorities read “was the more strengthened in the word.”

46. There is a Western addition: “in whom God was well pleased.”

47. Cf. the quotation of Ps. 2:7 in Acts 13:33 (again on Paul’s lips). Indeed, “the most interesting and most distinctively Pauline use of in Rom. 8 and Gal. 4, goes much deeper than mere messianism.” But even in Acts 9:20 something “deeper than mere messianism” may be implied: Luke is not necessarily representing Paul here “on one of the shallower of Paul’s own levels of thinking” (C. F. D. Moule, “The Christology of Acts,” in Studies in Luke-Acts, ed. L. E. Keck and J. L. Martyn [Nashville, 1966], p. 174).

48. See especially the famous logion Matt. 11:25–27 par. Luke 10:21–22.

49. A. E. Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History (London, 1982), pp. 154–73. See also J. Bieneck, Sohn Gottes als Christusbezeichnung der Synoptiker, ATANT 21 (Zürich, 1951); V. Taylor, The Names of Jesus (London, 1953), pp. 52–65; G. Vos, The Self Disclosure of Jesus (Grand Rapids, 1954), pp. 141–226; M. Hengel. The Son of God, E.T. (London, 1976).

50. The verb rendered “proved” (Gk. ) means literally “placing together”—here placing the OT promises alongside their fulfilment and hence “proving” that Jesus was the one to whom they pointed. This was the method of argument regularly employed (according to Luke) by Paul, Apollos, and others in synagogues around the eastern Mediterranean (cf. 17:2–3; 18:28; 26:22–23).

51. Cf. K. Lake, The Earlier Epistles of St. Paul (London, 1914), pp. 320–23.

52. E. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums, III (Stuttgart/Berlin, 1923), p. 346, describes the ethnarch as “head of the Nabataean colony in Damascus”; cf. E. A. Knauf, “Zum Ethnarchen des Aretas 2 Kor 11,32,” ZNW 74 (1983), pp. 145–47. It was been argued—e.g., by Schürer (II, pp. 129–30)—from the absence of Roman coins at Damascus between A.D. 34 and 62 that Damascus was at this time included in the Nabataean kingdom. For arguments against this view Meyer refers with approval to E. Schwartz, “Die Aeren von Gerasa und Eleutheropolis,” NGG 1906, pp. 367–68. If Damascus had been under Nabataean control the ethnarch could have arrested Saul openly.

53. Cf. H. Windisch, Der zweite Korintherbrief, KEK 6 (Göttingen, ⁹1924), p. 366.

54. The expression “his disciples” (v. 25) suggests that Saul’s preaching in Damascus had not been unfruitful.

55. The word rendered “basket” here is (otherwise spelled ), the word used in the narrative of the feeding of the 4,000 (Mark 8:8). The word in 2 Cor. 11:33 is , “a large woven or network bag or basket suitable for hay, straw … or for bales of wool” (Lake-Cadbury, Beginnings 1.4, p. 106).

56. For “Hellenists” (‘) A reads “Greeks” (‘).

57. For an imaginative reconstruction of Barnabas’s earlier relations with Saul see J. A. Robertson, The Hidden Romance of the New Testament (London, 1920), pp. 46–61.

58. Perhaps the verb rendered “to get to know” () should be pressed to yield its more precise classical sense: “to make inquiry of Cephas.” See F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Galatians, NIGTC (Grand Rapids/Exeter, 1982), pp. 98–99; also O. Hofius, “Gal 1,18: ,” ZNW 75 (1984), pp. 73–85.

59. Cf. O. Linton, “The Third Aspect: A Neglected Point of View,” ST 3 (1949), pp. 79–95.

60. As a parallel to this sense of its use in 1 Cor. 16:18 is adduced (RSV “give recognition to”).

61. L. E. Browne, The Acts of the Apostles (London, 1925), pp. 162–66. Another way of mitigating the discrepancy is to suppose that “the churches of Judaea” in Gal. 1:22 are the churches outside the capital, the church of Jerusalem being excluded. (See A. Ehrhardt, The Acts of the Apostles [Manchester, 1969], p. 63.) But that is an unnatural interpretation in the context. There would have been little value in Paul’s insisting that he remained unknown to the churches of the Judaean countryside if his readers had been free to infer that he was known to the church of Jerusalem; that was the very impression that he was concerned to remove.

62. “The newly converted Saul was not one to keep silence for a fortnight, and very probably preached in the city. The words ‘coming in and going out at Jerusalem’ do not mean that he visited places outside the city, but that he moved about freely and fearlessly in and out of houses in the city” (A. H. McNeile and C. S. C. Williams, Introduction to the New Testament [Oxford, 1953], p. 113); cf. H. N. Ridderbos, The Epistle of Paul to the Churches of Galatia, NICNT (Grand Rapids, 1953), pp. 72–73.

63. W. M. Ramsay (St. Paul the Traveller [London, ¹⁴1920], pp. 60–64) holds that the vision described in 22:17–21 must have taken place during Paul’s second post-conversion visit to Jerusalem (the famine relief visit of 11:30), because (among other reasons) the cause of his departure from Jerusalem at the end of his first visit (as related here by Luke) was “totally different” from that assigned in his description of the vision. L. E. Browne (Acts, p. 166) points out that this is another discrepancy removed by his emendation.

64. See E. M. B. Green, “Syria and Cilicia—A Note,” ExT 71 (1959–60), pp. 52–53.

65. See on 21:39 (p. 413).

66. Strabo, Geography 14.5.13.

67. See on 22:3 (p. 415). W. M. Ramsay tends to overestimate Tarsian influence on Paul in his admirable section on Tarsus in The Cities of St. Paul (London, 1907), pp. 83–244. On Tarsus see also D. Magie, Roman Rule in Asia Minor (Princeton, 1950), I, p. 272; II, pp. 1146–48.

68. The Western and Byzantine texts read “the churches,” with plural verbs.

69. F. J. A. Hort, The Christian Ecclesia (London, 1897), pp. 55–56. The possibility that the plural reading is original is reopened by K. N. Giles, “Luke’s Use of the term with special reference to Acts 20.28 and 9.31,” NTS 31 (1985), pp. 135–42.

70. On the three accounts see G. Lüdemann, Paul, Apostle to the Gentiles: Studies in Chronology, E.T. (London, 1984), pp. 139, 180 (n. 3).

71. Phil. 3:5, ’.

72. Gal. 1:14; cf. 22:3 below.

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