The Expositor's Bible: The Acts of the Apostles Volume Ii Part 13

[183] See Procter on the Common Prayer, p. 212; Canon Evan Daniel on the Prayer Book, pp. 87 and 300.

[184] See on this subject of the confusion of Christianity with Judaism by the Romans, Wieseler's _Die Christenverfolgungen der Casaren_, pp. 1-10.

I. Let us now take a rapid survey of the extensive journey which our book disposes of in very concise fas.h.i.+on. St. Paul and his companions, Aquila and Priscilla, Timothy and Silas, sailed from Cenchreae to Ephesus, which city up to this seems to have been untouched by Christian influences. St. Paul, in the earlier portion of his second tour, had been prohibited by the Holy Spirit from preaching in Ephesus, or in any portion of the provinces of Asia or Bithynia.

Important as the human eye of St. Paul may have viewed them, still the Divine Guide of the Church saw that neither Asia nor Bithynia, with all their magnificent cities, their acc.u.mulated wealth, and their political position, were half so important as the cities and provinces of Europe, viewed from the standpoint of the world's conversion. But now the gospel has secured a substantial foothold in Europe, has taken a firm grasp of that imperial race which then ruled the world, and so the Apostle is permitted to visit Ephesus for the first time. He seems to have then paid a mere pa.s.sing visit to it, lasting perhaps while the s.h.i.+p discharged the portion of her cargo destined for Ephesus. But St. Paul never allowed time to hang heavy on his hands for want of employment. He left Aquila and Priscilla engaged in their mercantile transactions, and, entering himself into the princ.i.p.al synagogue, proceeded to expound his views. These do not seem to have then aroused any opposition; nay, the Jews even went so far as to desire him to tarry longer and open out his doctrines at greater length. We may conclude from this that St. Paul did not remain during this first visit much beyond one Sabbath day. If he had bestowed a second Sabbath day upon the Ephesian synagogue, his ideas and doctrines would have been made so clear and manifest that the Jews would not have required much further exposition in order to see their drift. St. Paul, after promising a second visit to them, left his old friends and a.s.sociates, Aquila and his wife, with whom he had lived for nearly two years, at Ephesus, and pushed on to Caesarea, a town which he must have already well known, and with which he was subsequently destined to make a long and unpleasant acquaintances.h.i.+p, arriving at Jerusalem in time probably for the Feast of Tabernacles, which was celebrated on September 16th, A.D. 53. Concerning the details of that visit we know nothing. Four years at least must have elapsed since he had seen James and the other venerated heads of the Mother Church. We can imagine then how joyously he would have told them, how eagerly they would have heard the glad story of the wonders G.o.d had wrought among the Gentiles through the power of Jesus Christ. After a short sojourn at Jerusalem St. Paul returned back to Caesarea, and thence went on to Antioch, the original seat of the Gentile mission for the propagation of the faith.

After refres.h.i.+ng himself with the kindly offices of fraternal intercourse and conversation at this great Christian centre, where broad liberal sentiment and wide Christian culture, free from any narrow prejudices, must have infused a tone into society far more agreeable to St. Paul than the unprogressive Judaising views which flourished in Jerusalem, St. Paul then determined to set off upon his third great tour, which must have begun at the earliest some time in the spring of A.D. 54, as soon as the snows of winter had pa.s.sed away and the pa.s.ses through the Taurus Range into the central regions of Asia Minor had been opened. We know nothing more concerning the extended journey he took on this occasion. He seems to have avoided towns like Lystra and Derbe, and to have directed his march straight to Galatia, where he had sufficient work to engage all his thought. We have no mention of the names of the particular Churches where he laboured. Ancyra, as it was then called, Angora as it is now named, in all probability demanded St. Paul's attention. If he visited it, he looked as the traveller does still upon the temple dedicated to the deity of Augustus and of Rome, the ruins of which have attracted the notice of every modern antiquary. Glad, however, as we should have been to gratify our curiosity by details like these, we are obliged to content ourselves with the information which St. Luke gives us, that St. Paul "went through the region of Galatia and Phrygia, in order, stablis.h.i.+ng all the disciples," leaving us a speaking example of the energising power, the invigorating effects, of a visitation such as St. Paul now conducted, sustaining the weak, arousing the careless, restraining the rash, guiding the whole body of the Church with the counsels of sanctified wisdom and heavenly prudence. Then, after his Phrygian and Galatian work was finished, St. Paul betook himself to a field which he long since desired to occupy, and determined to fulfil the promise made a year previously at least to his Jewish friends of the Ephesian Synagogue.

II. Now we come to the foundation of the Ephesian Church some time in the latter part of the year 54 A.D. Here it may strike some reader as an extraordinary thing that more than twenty years after the Crucifixion Ephesus was as yet totally untouched by the gospel, so that the tidings of salvation were quite a novel sound in the great Asiatic capital. People sometimes think of the primitive Church as if, after the Day of Pentecost, every individual Christian rushed off to preach in the most distant parts of the world, and that the whole earth was evangelised straight off. They forget the teaching of Christ about the gospel leaven, and leaven never works all on an heap as it were; it is slow, regular, progressive in its operations. The tradition, too, that the apostles did not leave Jerusalem till twelve years after His ascension ought to be a sufficient corrective of this false notion; and though this tradition may not have any considerable historical basis, yet it shows that the primitive Church did not cherish the very modern idea that enormous and immediate successes followed upon the preaching of the gospel after Pentecost, and that the conversion of vast populations at once occurred. The case was exactly contrary. For many a long year nothing at all was done towards the conversion of the Gentile world, and then for many another long year the preaching of the gospel among the Gentiles entirely depended upon St. Paul alone. He was the one evangelist of the Gentiles, and therefore it is no wonder he should have said in 1 Cor. i. 17, "Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." He was the one man fitted to deal with the prejudices, the ignorance, the sensuality, the grossness with which the Gentile world was overspread, and therefore no other work, no matter how important, was to be allowed to interfere with that one task which he alone could perform. This seems to me the explanation of the question which might otherwise cause some difficulty, how was it that the Ephesians, Jews and Gentiles alike, inhabiting this distinguished city, were still in such dire ignorance of the gospel message twenty years after the Ascension? Now let us come to the story of the circ.u.mstances amid which Ephesian Christianity took its rise. St. Paul, as we have already said, paid a pa.s.sing visit to Ephesus just a year before when going up to Jerusalem, when he seems to have made a considerable impression in the synagogue. He left behind him Aquila and Priscilla, who, with their household, formed a small Christian congregation, meeting doubtless for the celebration of the Lord's Supper in their own house while yet frequenting the stated wors.h.i.+p of the synagogue. This we conclude from the following circ.u.mstance which is expressly mentioned in Acts xviii.

26. Apollos, a Jew, born in Alexandria, and a learned man, as was natural coming from that great centre of Greek and Oriental culture, came to Ephesus. He had been baptized by some of John's disciples, either at Alexandria or in Palestine. It may very possibly have been at Alexandria. St. John's doctrines and followers may have spread to Alexandria by that time, as we are expressly informed they had been diffused as far as Ephesus (see ch. xix. 1-4). Apollos, when he came to Ephesus, entered, like St. Paul, into the synagogue, and "spake and taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John." He knew about Jesus Christ, but with an imperfect knowledge such merely as John himself possessed. This man began to speak boldly in the synagogue on the topic of the Messiah whom John had preached.

Aquila and Priscilla were present in the synagogue, heard the disputant, recognised his earnestness and his defects, and then, having taken him, expounded to him the way of G.o.d more fully, initiating him into the full mysteries of the faith by baptism into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.[185] This incident has an important bearing upon the foundation and development of the Ephesian Church, but it hears more directly still upon the point on which we have been dwelling. Apollos disputed in the synagogues where Aquila and Priscilla heard him, so that they must have been regular wors.h.i.+ppers there notwithstanding their Christian profession and their close intercourse with St. Paul for more than eighteen months. After a little time further, Apollos desired to pa.s.s over to Greece. The little Christian Church which met at Aquila's house told him of the wonders they had seen and heard in Achaia and of the flouris.h.i.+ng state of the Church in Corinth. They gave him letters commendatory to that Church, whither Apollos pa.s.sed over, and rendered such valuable help that his name a year or two later became one of the watchwords of Corinthian party strife. The way was now prepared for St. Paul's great mission to Ephesus, exceeding in length any mission he had hitherto conducted, surpa.s.sing in its duration of three years the time spent even at Corinth itself. His own brief visit of the year before, the visit and work of the Alexandrian Jew, the quiet conversations, the holy lives, the sanctified examples of Aquila and Priscilla, these had done the preliminary work. They had roused expectation, provoked discussion, developed thought. Everything was ready for the great masterful teacher to step upon the ground and complete the work which he had already so auspiciously begun.

[185] Meyer, in his Commentary on ch. xix. 5, enunciates the following extraordinary theory about Apollos, which plainly shows that, valuable as may be his textual criticism, his conception of Christian doctrine and of Apostolic Church life is very defective: "We may not infer from this pa.s.sage that the disciples of John, who pa.s.sed over to Christianity, were uniformly re-baptized; for in the case of the apostles who pa.s.sed over from John to Jesus this certainly did not take place; and even as regards Apollos the common opinion that he was baptized by Aquila is purely arbitrary, as in xviii. 26 his instruction in Christianity, and not his baptism, is narrated." Again: "Apollos could dispense with re-baptism, seeing that he, with his fervid spirit, following the references of John to Christ, and the instruction of his teachers, penetrated without any new baptismal consecration into the pneumatic elements of life." Meyer evidently fails to grasp what the sacrament of baptism was, as conceived by St. Paul, and uses the most dangerous line of argument, that from silence, concluding that, because there is no mention of the Christian baptism of Apollos, therefore such a baptism never took place. But this is not all. Meyer's theory cannot possibly explain why baptism was necessary for Cornelius, though he enjoyed the gift of the Holy Ghost, while it was not necessary for Apollos, "who penetrated without any new baptismal consecration into the pneumatic element of life." Meyer says, indeed, that in the whole New Testament there is no example except in xix. 1-5 of the re-baptism of a disciple of John. But then in the Acts and Epistles, where alone we read of the administration of Christian baptism, there are only two examples of the admission of John's disciples. In one case twelve such were admitted, and they were all baptized by Paul's own order. In the case of Apollos there is silence. Surely the sounder conclusion is that Christian baptism was administered there too, though nothing is said about it! As for the apostles not being baptized with Christian baptism, the explanation is not far to seek. Baptism is the reception of a disciple into covenant with Christ through the medium of water. In the case of the apostles this reception took place in person, and not through any medium. In the apostles' case, too, there is another consideration. Meyer's conclusion is simply one _e silentio_ even in their case. We know not, however, everything that Christ did as regards His apostles.

I do not propose to discuss the roads by which St. Paul may have travelled through the province of Asia on this eventful visit, nor to discuss the architectural features, or the geographical position of the city of Ephesus. These things I shall leave to the writers who have treated of St. Paul's life. I now confine myself to the notices inserted by St. Luke concerning the Apostle's Ephesian work, and about it I note that upon his arrival St. Paul came in contact with a small congregation of the disciples of John the Baptist,[186] who had hitherto escaped the notice of the small Church existing at Ephesus.

This need not excite our wonder. We are apt to think that because Christianity is now such a dominant element in our own intellectual and religious atmosphere it must always have been the same. Ephesus, too, was then an immense city, with a large population of Jews, who may have had many synagogues. These few disciples of John the Baptist may have wors.h.i.+pped in a synagogue which never heard of the brief visit of a Cilician Jew, a teacher named Saul of Tarsus, much less of the quiet efforts of Aquila and Priscilla, the tentmakers, lately come from Corinth. St. Paul, on his second visit, soon came in contact with these men. He at once asked them a question which tested their position and attainments in the Divine life, and sheds for us a vivid light upon apostolic doctrine and practice. "Did ye receive the Holy Ghost when ye believed?" is plainly an inquiry whether they had enjoyed the blessing connected with the solemn imposition of hands, from which has been derived the rite of confirmation, as I showed in the previous volume. The disciples soon revealed the imperfect character of their religion by their reply: "Nay, we did not so much as hear whether the Holy Ghost was," words which led St. Paul to demand what in that case was the nature of their baptism. "Into what then were ye baptized?" and they said, "Into John's baptism."

[186] The movement inst.i.tuted by St. John the Baptist was perpetuated into the second century, and in some measure developed into, or connected itself with, the sect subsequently called the Hemerobaptists. The history of this movement from apostolic days is elaborately traced by Bishop Lightfoot in his Essay on the Essenes, contained in his _Colossians and Philemon_; see especially pp. 400-407, to which we must refer the reader desirous of more information. The Hemerobaptists are mentioned in the _Clementine Recognitions_, i. 54, the _Clementine Homilies_, ii.

23, which date from about 200 A.D., and in the _Apostolic Const.i.tutions_, vi. 6, which may be put down as a century later.

This shows the continuity of the sect. There are still some fragments of it existing in Babylonia, under the name of Mandeans: see further the article "Sabians" in Smith's _Dict. Christ.

Biog._, iv. 569-73.

Now the simple explanation of the disciples' ignorance was that they had been baptized with John's baptism, which had no reference to or mention of the Holy Ghost. St. Paul, understanding them to be baptized disciples, could not understand their ignorance of the personal existence and present power of the Holy Ghost, till he learned from them the nature of their baptism, and then his surprise ceased. But then we must observe that the question of the Apostle astonished at their defective state--"Into what then were ye baptized?"--implies that, if baptized with Christian baptism, they would have known of the existence of the Holy Ghost, and therefore further implies that the baptismal formula into the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, was of universal application among Christians; for surely if this formula were not universally used by the Church, many Christians might be in exactly the same position as these disciples of John, and never have heard of the Holy Ghost![187] St. Paul, having expounded the difference between the inchoate, imperfect, beginning knowledge, of the Baptist, and the richer, fuller teaching of Jesus Christ, then handed them over for further preparation to his a.s.sistants, by whom, after due fasting and prayer, they were baptized,[188] and at once presented to the Apostle for the imposition of hands; when the Holy Ghost was vouchsafed in present effects, "they spake with tongues and prophesied," as if to sanction in a special manner the decided action taken by the Apostle on this occasion.

[187] See my remarks on this topic on pp. 141, 142 of my first volume on Acts.

[188] See the _Didache_, or _Teaching of the Twelve Apostles_, concerning the methods used in preparation for baptism.

The details concerning this affair, given to us by the sacred writer, are most important. They set forth at greater length and with larger fulness the methods ordinarily used by the Apostle than on other similar occasions. The Philippian jailor was converted and baptized, but we read nothing of the imposition of hands. Dionysius and Damaris, Aquila and Priscilla, and many others at Athens and Corinth, were converted, but there is no mention of either baptism or any other holy rite. It might have been very possible to argue that the silence of the writer implied utter contempt of the sacraments of the gospel and the rite of confirmation on these occasions, were it not that we have this detailed account of the manner in which St. Paul dealt with half-instructed, unbaptized, and unconfirmed disciples of Christ Jesus. They were instructed, baptized, and confirmed, and thus introduced into the fulness of blessing, required by the discipline of the Lord, as ministered by his faithful servant. If this were the routine observed with those who had been taught "carefully the things of Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John," how much more would it have been the case with those rescued out of the pollutions of paganism and called into the kingdom of light!

III. After this favourable beginning, and seeing the borders of the infant Church extended by the union of these twelve disciples, St.

Paul, after his usual fas.h.i.+on, flung himself into work amongst the Jews of Ephesus upon whom he had previously made a favourable impression. He was well received for a time. He continued for three months "reasoning and persuading as to the things concerning the kingdom of G.o.d." But, as it was elsewhere, so was it at Ephesus, the offence of the Cross told in the long run upon the wors.h.i.+ppers of the synagogue. The original Christian Church was Jewish. Aquila and Priscilla, Apollos and Timothy, and the disciples of John the Baptist would have excited no resentment in the minds of the Jews; but when St. Paul began to open out the hope which lay for Gentiles as well as for Jews in the gospel which he preached, then the objections of the synagogue were multiplied, riots and disturbances became, as elsewhere, matters of daily occurrence, and the opposition became at last so bitter that, as at Corinth, so here again at Ephesus the Apostle was obliged to separate his own followers, and gather them into the school of one Tyrannus, a teacher of philosophy or rhetoric, whom perhaps he had converted, where the blasphemous denunciations against the Divine Way which he taught could no longer be heard.[189]

In this school or lecture-hall St. Paul continued labouring for more than two years, bestowing upon the city of Ephesus a longer period of continuous labour than he ever vouchsafed to any place else. We have St. Paul's own statement as to his method of life at this period in the address he subsequently delivered to the elders of Ephesus. The Apostle pursued at Ephesus the same course which he adopted at Corinth in one important direction at least. He supported himself and his immediate companions, Timothy and Sosthenes, by his own labour, and that we may presume for precisely the same reason at Ephesus as at Corinth. He desired to cut off all occasion of accusation against himself. Ephesus was a city devoted to commerce and to magic. It was full of impostors too, many of them Jewish, who made gain out of the names of angels and magical formulae derived from the pretended wisdom of Solomon handed down to them by secret succession, or derived to them from contact with the lands of the far-distant East. St. Paul determined, therefore, that he would give no opportunity of charging him with trading upon the credulity of his followers, or working with an eye to covetous or dishonest gains. "I coveted no man's silver or gold or apparel. Ye yourselves know that these hands ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me," is the description he gave of the manner in which he discharged his apostolic office in Ephesus, when addressing the elders of that city. We can thus trace St. Paul labouring at his trade as a tentmaker for nearly a period of five years, combining the time spent at Ephesus with that spent at Corinth. Notwithstanding, however, the attention and energy which this exercise of his trade demanded, he found time for enormous evangelistic and pastoral work. In fact, we find St. Paul nowhere else so much occupied with pastoral work as at Ephesus. Elsewhere we see the devoted evangelist, rus.h.i.+ng in with the pioneers, breaking down all hindrances, heading the stormers to whom was committed the fiercest struggle, the most deadly conflict, and then at once moving into fresh conflicts, leaving the spoils of victory and the calmer work of peaceful pastoral labours to others. But here in Ephesus we see St. Paul's marvellous power of adaptation. He is at one hour a clever artisan capable of gaining support sufficient for others as well as for himself; then he is the skilful controversialist "reasoning daily in the school of one Tyrannus"; and then he is the indefatigable pastor of souls "teaching publicly, and from house to house," and "ceasing not to admonish every one night and day with tears."

[189] See pp. 32, 33 above for some remarks on this t.i.tle, the Way, used in the Acts for the Gospel Dispensation or the Christian Church. Cf. also ch. ix. 2, xix. 23, xxii. 4, xxiv. 14, and the expression the Way of Life in the _Didache_.

But this was not all, or nearly all, the burden the Apostle carried.

He had to be perpetually on the alert against Jewish plots. We hear nothing directly of Jewish attempts on his life or liberty during the period of just three years which he spent on this prolonged visit. We might be sure, however, from our previous experience of the synagogues, that he must have run no small danger in this direction; but then when we turn to the same address we hear something of them.

He is recalling to the minds of the Ephesian elders the circ.u.mstances of his life in their community from the beginning, and he therefore appeals thus: "Ye yourselves know from the first day that I set foot in Asia, after what manner I was with you all the time, serving the Lord with all lowliness of mind, and with tears, _and with trials which befell me with plots of the Jews_." Ephesus again was a great field wherein he personally worked; it was also a great centre for missionary operations which he superintended. It was the capital of the province of Asia, the richest and most important of all the Roman provinces, teeming with resources, abounding in highly civilised and populous cities, connected with one another by an elaborate network of admirably constructed roads. Ephesus was cut out by nature and by art alike as a missionary centre whence the gospel should radiate out into all the surrounding districts. And so it did. "All they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks," is the testimony of St. Luke with respect to the wondrous progress of the gospel, not in Ephesus alone, but also throughout all the province, a statement which we find corroborated a little lower down in the same nineteenth chapter by the independent testimony of Demetrius the silversmith, who, when he was endeavouring to stir up his fellow-craftsmen to active exertions in defence of their endangered trade, says, "Ye see and hear that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people." St. Paul's disciples laboured, too, in the other cities of Asia, as Epaphras for instance in Colossae. And St. Paul himself, we may be certain, bestowed the gifts and blessings of his apostolic office by visiting these local Churches, as far as he could consistently with the pressing character of his engagements in Ephesus.[190] But even the superintendence of vast missions throughout the province of Asia did not exhaust the prodigious labours of St.

Paul. He perpetually bore about in his bosom anxious thoughts for the welfare, trials, and sorrows of the numerous Churches he had established in Europe and Asia alike. He was constant in prayers for them, mentioning the individual members by name, and he was unwearied in keeping up communications with them, either by verbal messages or by written epistles, one specimen of which remains in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, written to them from Ephesus, and showing us the minute care, the comprehensive interest, the intense sympathy which dwelt within his breast with regard to his distant converts all the while that the work at Ephesus, controversial, evangelistic and pastoral, to say nothing at all of his tentmaking, was making the most tremendous demands on body and soul alike, and apparently absorbing all his attention. It is only when we thus realise bit by bit what the weak, delicate, emaciated Apostle must have been doing, that we are able to grasp the full meaning of his own words to the Corinthians: "Besides those things that are without, there is that which presseth upon me daily, anxiety for all the Churches."

[190] Bishop Lightfoot, _Colossians_, Introd., p. 30, has some good remarks bearing on this topic: "How or when the conversion of the Colossians took place we have no direct information. Yet it can hardly be wrong to connect the event with St. Paul's long sojourn at Ephesus. Here he remained preaching for three whole years. It is possible, indeed, that during this period he paid short visits to other neighbouring cities of Asia; but if so, the notices in the Acts oblige us to suppose these interruptions to his residence in Ephesus to have been slight and infrequent. Yet, though the Apostle himself was stationary in the capital, the Apostolic influence and teaching spread far beyond the limits of the city and its immediate neighbourhood. It was hardly an exaggeration when Demetrius declared that 'almost throughout all Asia this Paul had persuaded and turned away much people.' The sacred historian himself uses equally strong language in describing the effects of the Apostle's preaching: 'All they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks.'

In accordance with these notices the Apostle himself, in an Epistle written during this sojourn, sends salutations to Corinth, not from the Church of Ephesus specially, as might have been antic.i.p.ated, but from the 'Churches of Asia' generally (1 Cor.

xvi. 19). St. Luke, it should be observed, ascribes this dissemination of the gospel not to journeys undertaken by the Apostle, but to his preaching at Ephesus itself. Thither, as to the metropolis of Western Asia, would flock crowds from all the towns and villages far and near. Thence they would carry away, each to his own neighbourhood, the spiritual treasure which they had so unexpectedly found."

This lengthened period of intense activity of mind and body terminated in an incident which ill.u.s.trates the peculiar character of St. Paul's Ephesian ministry. Ephesus was a town where the spiritual and moral atmosphere simply reeked with the fumes, ideas, and practices of Oriental paganism, of which magical incantations formed the predominant feature. Magic prevailed all over the pagan world at this time. In Rome, however, magical practices were always more or less under the ban of public opinion, though at times resorted to even by those whose office called upon them to suppress illegal actions. A couple of years before the very time at which we have arrived, workers in magic, among whom were included astrologers, or mathematicians, as the Roman law called them, were banished from Rome simultaneously with the Jews, who always enjoyed an unenviable notoriety for such occult practices.[191] In Asia Minor and the East they flourished at this time under the patronage of religion, and continued to flourish in all the great cities down to Christian times. Christianity itself could not wholly banish magic which retained its hold upon the half-converted Christians who flocked into the Church in crowds during the second half of the fourth century; and we learn from St.

Chrysostom himself, that when a young man he had a narrow escape for his life owing to the continuance of magical practices in Antioch, more than three hundred years after St. Paul.[192] It is no wonder that when Diana's wors.h.i.+p reigned supreme at Ephesus, magical practices should also flourish there. If, however, there existed a special development of the power of evil at Ephesus, G.o.d also bestowed a special manifestation of Divine power in the person and ministry of St. Paul, as St. Luke expressly declares: "G.o.d wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul, insomuch that unto the sick were carried away from his body handkerchiefs or ap.r.o.ns, and the diseases departed from them, and the evil spirits departed from them." This pa.s.sage has been often found a stumbling-block by many persons. They have thought that it has a certain legendary air about it, as they in turn think that there is a certain air of legend about the similar pa.s.sage in Acts v. 12-16, which makes much the same statement about St. Peter. When writing about this latter pa.s.sage in my previous volume, p. 230, I offered some suggestions which lessen, if they do not quite take away, the difficulty; to these I shall now only refer my readers. But I think we can see a local reason for the peculiar development or manifestation of miraculous power through St. Paul. The devil's seat was just then specially at Ephesus, so far as the great province of Asia was concerned. The powers of evil had concentrated all their force and all their wealth of external grandeur, intellectual cleverness, and spiritual trickery in order to lead men captive; and there G.o.d, in order that He might secure a more striking victory for truth upon this magnificent stage, armed His faithful servant with an extraordinary development of the good powers of the world to come, enabling him to work special wonders in the sight of the heathen. Can we not read an echo of the fearful struggle just then waged in the metropolis of Asia in words addressed some years later to the members of the same Church, "For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against the princ.i.p.alities, against the powers, against the world-rulers of this darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places"? We make a great mistake when we think of the apostles as working miracles when and as they liked. At times their evangelistic work seems to have been conducted without any extraordinary manifestations, and then at other times, when the power of Satan was specially put forth, G.o.d displayed His special strength, enabling His servants to work wonders and signs in His Name. It was much the same as in the Old Testament. The Old Testament miracles will be found to cl.u.s.ter themselves round the deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, and its Reformation at the hand of Elijah. So, too, the recorded miracles of the apostles will be found to gather round St.

Peter's earlier work in Jerusalem, where Satan strove to counter-work G.o.d's designs in one way, and St. Paul's ministry in Ephesus, where Satan strove to counter-work them in another way. One incident at Ephesus attracted special attention. There was a priestly family, consisting of seven sons, belonging to the Jews at Ephesus. Their father had occupied high position among the various courses which in turn served the Temple, even as Zacharias, the father of the Baptist, did. These men observed the power with which St. Paul dealt with human spirits disordered by the powers of evil, using for that purpose the sacred name of Jesus. They undertook to use the same sacred invocation; but it proved, like the censers of Korah, Dathan and Abiram, a strange fire kindled against their own souls. The man possessed by the evil spirit recognised not their presumptuous efforts, but attacked them, and did them serious bodily injury. This circ.u.mstance spread the fame of the man of G.o.d wider and wider. The power of magic and of the demons fell before him, even as the image of Dagon fell before the Ark. Many of the nominal believers in Christianity had still retained their magical practices as of yore, even as nominal Christians retained them in the days of St.

Chrysostom. The reality of St. Paul's power, demonstrated by the awful example of Sceva's sons, smote them in their inmost conscience. They came, confessed their deeds, brought their magical books together,[193] and gave the greatest proof of their honest convictions; for they burned them in the sight of all, and counting the price thereof found it fifty thousand pieces of silver, or more than two thousand pounds of our money. "So mightily grew the word of the Lord and prevailed" in the very chosen seat of the Ephesian Diana.

[191] I allude, of course, to the decree of Claudius against the Jews in A.D. 52, to which Suetonius (_Claudius_, 25) and Dio Ca.s.sius, lx. 6, refer; cf. Tacitus, _Annals_, xii. 52, and Lewin's _Fasti Sacri_, A.D. 52.

[192] The story is an interesting one. It will be found in Stephens' _Life of St. Chrysostom_, p. 61. The Emperor Valens had discovered that some of his enemies had been endeavouring, through magical contrivances something like table-rapping, to spell out the name of his successor, and had succeeded so far that they had found out the first part of the name as Theod, but the oracle could tell nothing more. The jealous Emperor ordered every prominent man with the names Theodore or Theodosius to be slain, vainly thinking to kill his own successor. He also ordered every one found with magical books in their possession to be at once slain. Chrysostom and a friend were walking in A.D. 374 on the banks of the Orontes when they saw a book floating down the stream. They stretched forth and rescued it, when, seeing that it was a magical book, they at once flung it back into the river, and not a moment too soon, as just then a police officer on detective duty appeared on the scene, from whom a moment earlier they could not have escaped. St. Chrysostom always regarded this as one of the great escapes of his life: see Art. "Chrysostom" in _Dict.

Christ. Biog._, vol. i., p. 520, and his own reference to the escape in his 38th Homily on the Acts, translated in the Oxford Library of the Fathers. Mr. Stephens, _l.c._, gives an account of the magical rites and their ceremonial, which was doubtless much the same in A.D. 374 as in A.D. 54, whence we take a brief extract: "The twenty-four letters of the alphabet were arranged at intervals round the rim of a kind of charger, which was placed on a tripod consecrated by magic songs and frequent ceremonies. The diviner, habited as a heathen priest, in linen robes, sandals, and with a fillet wreathed about his head, chanted a hymn to Apollo, the G.o.d of prophecy, while a ring in the centre of the charger was slipped rapidly round a slender thread. The letters in front of which the ring successively stopped indicated the character of the oracle."

[193] The magical books thus consigned to the flames by the Christian believers who practised magic were filled with figures or characters technically called "Ephesian letters," G??ata ?f?s?a. These were mystic characters and strange words which were engraven on the crown, zone, and feet of the G.o.ddess. Clement of Alexandria discusses their use, and says the Greeks were greatly addicted to them, in his _Stromata_, v. 8, as translated in Clement's works, vol. ii., p. 247, in Clark's Ante-Nicene Library. The same use of curious mystic words pa.s.sed over to the Manichaeans and other secret sects of mediaeval times.

See also Guhl's _Ephesiaca_, p. 94 (Berlin, 1843), where all the authorities on this curious subject are collected together.

Conybeare and Howson, ch. xiv., give them from Guhl in a handy shape. Great quant.i.ties of these "Ephesian letters" have been found among the Faym Ma.n.u.scripts discovered in Egypt, which almost universally make a large use of the name Iao or Jehovah, showing their contact with Judaism.

CHAPTER XV.

_THE EPHESIAN RIOT AND A PRUDENT TOWN CLERK._

"About that time there arose no small stir concerning the Way.

For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines of Diana, brought no little business unto the craftsmen; whom he gathered together, with the workmen of like occupation, and said, Sirs, ye know that by this business we have our wealth. And ye see and hear, that not alone at Ephesus, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying that they be no G.o.ds, which are made with hands; and not only is there danger that this our trade come into disrepute; but also that the temple of the great G.o.ddess Diana be made of no account, and that she should even be deposed from her magnificence, whom all Asia and the world wors.h.i.+ppeth."--ACTS xix. 23-8.

St. Paul's labours at Ephesus covered, as he informs us himself, when addressing the elders of that city, a s.p.a.ce of three years. The greater portion of that period had now expired, and had been spent in peaceful labours so far as the heathen world and the Roman authorities were concerned. The Jews, indeed, had been very troublesome at times.

It is in all probability to them and their plots St. Paul refers when in 1 Cor. xv. 32 he says, "If after the manner of men I fought with beasts at Ephesus, what doth it profit me?" as the unbelieving Gentiles do not seem to have raised any insurrection against his teaching till he felt his work was done, and he was, in fact, preparing to leave Ephesus. Before, however, we proceed to discuss the startling events which finally decided his immediate departure, we must consider a brief pa.s.sage which connects the story of Sceva's sons and their impious temerity with that of the silversmith Demetrius and the Ephesian riot.

The incident connected with Sceva's sons led to the triumph over the workers in magic, when the secret professors of that art came and publicly acknowledged their hidden sins, proving their reality by burning the instruments of their wickedness. Here, then, St. Luke inserts a notice which has proved to be of the very greatest importance in the history of the Christian Church. Let us insert it in full that we may see its bearing: "Now after these things were ended, Paul purposed in the spirit, when he had pa.s.sed through Macedonia and Achaia, to go to Jerusalem, saying, After I have been there, I must also see Rome. And having sent into Macedonia two of them that ministered unto him, Timothy and Erastus, he himself stayed in Asia for a while." This pa.s.sage tells us that St. Paul, after his triumph over the practices of magic, and feeling too that the Church had been effectually cleansed, so far as human foresight and care could effect it, from the corroding effects of the prevalent Ephesian vice, now determined to transfer the scene of his labours to Macedonia and Achaia, wis.h.i.+ng to visit those Churches which five years before he had founded. It was full five years, at least, since he had seen the Philippian, Thessalonian, and Beran congregations. Better than three years had elapsed since he had left Corinth, the scene of more prolonged work than he had ever bestowed on any other city except Ephesus. He had heard again and again from all these places, and some of the reports, especially those from Corinth, had been very disquieting. The Apostle wished, therefore, to go and see for himself how the Churches of Christ in Macedonia and Achaia were faring. He next wished to pay a visit to Jerusalem to consult with his brethren, and then felt his destiny pus.h.i.+ng him still westwards, desiring to see Rome, the world's capital, and the Church which had sprung up there, of which his friends Priscilla and Aquila must have told him much.

Such seems to have been his intentions in the spring of the year 57, to which his three years' sojourn in Ephesus seems now to have brought him.

The interval of time covered by the two verses which I have quoted above is specially interesting, because it was just then that the First Epistle to the Corinthians was written. All the circ.u.mstances and all the indications of time which the Epistle itself offers conspire to fix the writing of it to this special date and place. The Epistle, for instance, refers to Timothy as having been already sent into Macedonia and Greece: "For this cause have I sent unto you Timothy, who shall put you in remembrance of my ways which be in Christ" (1 Cor. iv. 17). In Acts xix. 22 we have it stated, "Having sent into Macedonia Timothy and Erastus." The Epistle again plainly tells us the very season of the year in which it was written. The references to the Pa.s.sover season--"For our pa.s.sover also hath been sacrificed, even Christ; wherefore let us keep the feast"--are words which naturally were suggested by the actual celebration of the Jewish feast, to a mind like St. Paul's, which readily grasped at every pa.s.sing allusion or chance incident to ill.u.s.trate his present teaching. Timothy and Erastus had been despatched in the early spring, as soon as the pa.s.ses and roads were thoroughly open and navigation established. The Pa.s.sover in A.D. 57 happened on April 7th, and the Apostle fixes the exact date of the First Epistle to Corinth, when in the sixteenth chapter and eighth verse he says to the Corinthians, "I will tarry at Ephesus until Pentecost." I merely refer now to this point to ill.u.s.trate the vastness of the Apostle's labours, and to call attention to the necessity for comparing together the Acts and the Epistles in the minute manner exemplified by Paley in the _Horae Paulinae_, if we wish to gain a complete view of a life like St.

Paul's, so completely consecrated to one great purpose.[194]

[194] This subject properly belongs to commentators on 1 Corinthians. Paley, in _Horae Paulinae_, ch. iii., and Dr. Marcus Dods, in his _Introduction to the New Testament_, pp. 104, 105, set forth the evidence in a convenient shape. I may remark that here, as elsewhere, I adopt in the main Mr. Lewin's chronology, as contained in his _Fasti Sacri_. Without pledging myself to agree in all his details, his scheme forms a good working hypothesis, on which a writer can work when composing an expositor's commentary, not one for professed critics or profound scholars.

Man may propose, but even an apostle cannot dispose of his fate as he will, or foretell under ordinary circ.u.mstances how the course of events will affect him. St. Paul intended to stay at Ephesus till Pentecost, which that year happened on May 28th. Circ.u.mstances however hastened his departure. We have been considering the story of St.

Paul's residence in Ephesus, but hitherto we have not heard one word about the great Ephesian deity, Diana, as the Romans called her, or Artemis, as St. Luke, according to the ordinary local use, correctly calls her in the Greek text of the Acts, or Anatis, as her ancient name had been from early times at Ephesus and throughout Asia Minor.[195] If this riot had not happened, if our attention had not been thus called to Diana and her wors.h.i.+p, there might have been a total blank in St. Luke's narrative concerning this famous deity, and her equally famous temple, which was at the time one of the wonders of the world. And then some scoffers reading in ancient history concerning the wonders of this temple, and finding the records of modern discoveries confirming the statements of antiquity might have triumphantly pointed to St. Luke's silence about Diana and the Ephesian temple as a proof of his ignorance. A mere pa.s.sing riot alone has saved us from this difficulty. Now this case well ill.u.s.trates the danger of arguing from silence. Silence concerning any special point is sometimes used as a proof that a particular writer knew nothing about it. But this is not the sound conclusion. Silence proves in itself nothing more than that the person who is silent either had no occasion to speak upon that point or else thought it wiser or more expedient to hold his tongue. Josephus, for instance, is silent about Christianity; but that is no proof that Christianity did not exist in his time, or that he knew nothing about it. His silence may simply have arisen because he found Christianity an awkward fact, and not knowing how to deal with it he left it alone. It is well to bear this simple law of historical evidence in mind, for a great many of the popular objections to the sacred narratives, both of the Old and New Testaments, are based upon the very dangerous ground of silence alone.[196] Let us, however, return to Diana of the Ephesians. The wors.h.i.+p of the G.o.ddess Artemis dominated the whole city of Ephesus,[197] and helped to shape the destinies of St. Paul at this season, for while intending to stay at Ephesus till Pentecost at the end of May, the annual celebration of Artemisia, the feast of the patron deity of the city, happened, of which celebration Demetrius took advantage to raise a disturbance which hastened St. Paul's departure into Macedonia.

[195] The student may consult on the identification of Artemis and the Oriental or Persian deity Anatis, the _Revue Archeologique_ for 1885, vol. ii., pp. 105-115, and Derenbourg and Saglio's _Dict. des Antiq._, s.v. Diana.

[196] This argument may be pressed further. The silence which we observe in much of second-century literature about the New Testament Canon and Episcopacy is of the same character. The best known and most notorious facts are those about which authors are most apt to be silent when writing for contemporaries, simply because every person acknowledges them and takes them for granted.

[197] This is manifest at once if the reader will consult Mr.

Wood's _Ephesus_ or Guhl's _Ephesiaca_, a work which, though published (in 1843) before modern discoveries had taught all we now know, is a most elaborate account of ancient Ephesus gleaned out of ancient writers.

We have now cleared the way for the consideration of the narrative of the riot, which is full of the most interesting information concerning the progress of the gospel, and offers us the most wonderful instances of the minute accuracy of St. Luke, which again have been ill.u.s.trated and confirmed in the fullest manner by the researches so abundantly bestowed upon Ephesus within the lifetime of the present generation.

Let us take the narrative in the exact order given us by St. Luke: "About that time there arose no small stir about the Way." But why about that special time? We have already said that here we find an indication of the date of the riot. It must have happened during the latter part of April, A.D. 57, and we know that at Ephesus almost the whole month of April, or Artemisius, was dedicated to the honour and wors.h.i.+p of Artemis.[198] But here it may be asked, How did it come to pa.s.s that Artemis or Diana occupied such a large share in the public wors.h.i.+p of Ephesus and the province of Asia? Has modern research confirmed the impression which this chapter leaves upon the mind, that the Ephesian people were above all else devoted to the wors.h.i.+p of the deity? The answers to both these queries are not hard to give, and serve to confirm our belief in the honesty and accuracy of the sacred penman. The wors.h.i.+p of Artemis, or of Anatis rather, prevailed in the peninsula of Asia Minor from the time of Cyrus, who introduced it six or seven centuries before.[199] Anatis was the Asiatic deity of fruitfulness, the same as Ashtoreth of the Bible, whom the Greeks soon identified with their own G.o.ddess Artemis. Her wors.h.i.+p quickly spread, specially through that portion of the country which afterwards became the province of Asia, and through the adjacent districts; showing how rapidly an evil taint introduced into a nation's spiritual life-blood spreads throughout its whole organisation, and when once introduced how persistently it holds its ground; a lesson taught here in New Testament times, as in Old Testament days it was proclaimed in Israel's case by the oft-repeated statement concerning her kings, "Howbeit from the sins of Jeroboam [king after king] departed not."

The spiritual life and tone of a nation is a very precious thing, and because it is so the Church of England does well to bestow so much of her public supplication upon those who have power, like Cyrus and Jeroboam, to taint it at the very foundation and origin thereof. When, for instance, St. Paul landed at Perga in Pamphylia, on the first occasion when he visited Asia Minor as a Christian missionary, his eye was saluted with the splendid temple of Diana on the side of the hill beneath which the city was built, and all over the country at every important town similar temples were erected in her honour, where their ruins have been traced by modern travellers.[200] The cult or wors.h.i.+p introduced by Cyrus exactly suited the morals and disposition of these Oriental Greeks, and flourished accordingly.

[198] See on the exact time of the Macedonian and Ephesian month of Artemisius, Ussher's treatise on the Macedonian and Asiatic solar year, in the seventh volume of his works Ed. Elrington, p.

425, with which may be compared Bishop Lightfoot's _Ignatius_, i.

660-700. Mr. Lewin, in his _Fasti Sacri_, p. 309, makes it the month of May. The Macedonian month Artemisius extended from March 25th to April 24th. This point is further discussed in Lewin's _St. Paul_, vol. i., p. 405. If St. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians at or shortly before April 7th, the date of the Pa.s.sover, the riot which hastened his departure must have happened within the succeeding fortnight. Bckh, in the Corpus of Greek Inscriptions, No.

2954, inserts a long Greek inscription, found one hundred and seventy years ago at Ephesus, laying down the ceremonial to be observed in honour of the deity throughout the whole month, which Mr. Lewin translates, vol. i., p. 405. See, however, more upon this below.