What Happens:
While Apollos is at Corinth (Acts 18) in Greece, Paul travels overland back to Ephesus, on the western edge of Turkey. He talks to some of the christians there and asks them if they received the Holy Spirit when they were baptized. They reply that they don’t know what the Holy Spirit is, but they received “John’s baptism”, i.e. one of water. Paul tells them, “John’s baptism was a baptism of repentance. He told the people to believe in the one coming after him, that is, in Jesus.” He re-baptizes them in the name of Jesus, and when he does they receive the Holy Spirit and begin to “speak in tongues” and prophesy.
Paul preaches in the synagogue for three months, arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God. Some of the Jews are very resistant to his message, and publicly malign “the Way”, i.e. Christianity. Paul leaves the angry Jews, and takes some of his followers to a lecture hall owned by a teacher named Tyrannus. Paul has daily discussions in the lecture hall for two years, until practically everyone in the province has heard his message.
While Paul is in Ephesus, God does extraordinary miracles through him. Handkerchiefs and napkins that have touched Paul are taken to the sick and their illnesses are cured. Seven sons of a Jewish chief priest start going around trying to drive out evil spirits in the name of Jesus. They tell the demons, “In the name of the Jesus whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.” One day an evil spirit actually answers them: “Jesus I know, and Paul I know about, but who are you?” Then the man possessed by the demon jumps up and beats all of them within an inch of their lives until they manage to escape and run away.
Both Jews and Greeks hear about this incident and get afraid, and start treating Jesus’ name with a lot more respect. Many people believe in Paul’s message, and openly confess their sins. A number of people who had practiced sorcery bring their magic scrolls and burn them publicly. When they calculate the value of the scrolls, the total comes to fifty thousand drachmas.
Paul decides he wants to briefly journey through Greece and Macedonia, before heading on to Jerusalem. Ultimately, he wants to go to Rome. He sends two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, on to Macedonia ahead of him, while Paul stays in Ephesus a little longer. Meanwhile, the Ephesian silversmiths make most of their money from crafting silver shrines of Artemis. One of the smiths, Demetrius, calls the other craftsmen together and gives a brief speech criticizing Paul: “You know, my friends, that we receive a good income from this business. And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus … He says that gods made by human hands are no gods at all. There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited; and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.” The crowd of craftsmen starts chanting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”
Soon, the whole city is in an uproar. A mob seizes two of Paul’s friends, Gaius and Aristarchus, and carry them off to the theater building. Paul wants to go speak to the crowd, his other friends won’t let him. Some of the provincial officials, who are also friends of Paul, send him a message begging him not to go. In the theater, a roiling crowd has assembled. The place is noisy and full of shouts, and some people don’t even know why they’re there. The Jews push one of their own, a man named Alexander, to the stage to speak. He motions the crowd to silence in order to begin his defense, but the when the crowd realizes he’s Jewish they shout him down and spend the next two hours chanting, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”
A city clerk finally manages to calm everyone down. “Fellow Ephesians, doesn’t all the world know that the city of Ephesus is the guardian of the temple of the great Artemis and of her image, which fell from heaven?” he says. “Therefore, since these facts are undeniable, you ought to calm down and not do anything rash. You have brought these men here, though they have neither robbed temples nor blasphemed our goddess. If, then, Demetrius and his fellow craftsmen have a grievance against anybody, the courts are open and there are proconsuls. They can press charges. … As it is, we are in danger of being charged with rioting because of what happened today.” After he’s done speaking, the crowd breaks up and leaves.
Commentary:
I’m a little confused about the baptism business; specifically, what exactly it means to be “baptized with the Holy Spirit”. Apparently the Ephesian group’s original baptism was in water, but not in Jesus’ name. Was it in anyone’s name? John’s, maybe? Their second baptism with Paul was presumably also with water, but done in Jesus’ name. This time, now that they’re baptized in Jesus’ name, they receive the Holy Spirit. And apparently then become able to “speak in tongues” and give prophecies. “Speaking in tongues” can mean either speaking gibberish or speaking in real, foreign, languages, depending on who you ask. Back in Acts 2 it meant getting the ability to spontaneously speak foreign languages in order to more easily tell the message to foreigners, so that’s probably what it means here as well. I suspect the “speaking random gibberish” interpretation of “speaking in tongues” (“tongues” meaning “languages” in old-timey English anyway) was invented in modern times, because it’s a lot easier to fake speaking spontaneous gibberish than it is to fake knowledge of, say, Spanish. But that’s just me. As for the prophesies that they’re also supposed to be able to give now, who knows. The sudden onset of “powers” or spiritual activity from the Holy Spirit is implied to be a short-term thing; i.e., they get a sudden burst of ability to do this stuff but it quickly fades, it’s not a life-long ability.
Also, is everyone supposed to get these sudden (if temporary) spiritual powers when they get baptized? Because I was baptized back when I was like 10, and I didn’t get any of these powers. My baptism followed the “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” formula that Jesus said to use in Matthew 28, so the HS was definitely included in there. But, no powers. 😦 Does that mean my baptism was faulty? If the absence of sudden spiritual powers indicates a faulty baptism, then wouldn’t most people’s baptisms be faulty, since no one I’ve ever seen has gotten any sudden ability to prophesy or whatever after being baptized? OTOH, it’s also possible that receiving the Holy Spirit via baptism doesn’t automatically mean you get spiritual powers like the Ephesians here; they could be the exception. Perhaps most people don’t get spontaneous abilities to speak in other languages and such, even though their baptism is totally valid, and the Holy Spirit just falls on them a little more quietly. Maybe the HS only falls on people “loudly”, so to speak, and grants exceptional (temporary) spiritual powers only on rare occasions when God is trying to make a point. Or, maybe I’m overthinking this. On to other things!
Can you imagine having a teacher named Tyrannus? Kinda reminds me of my high school English teacher. Yowza.
Re: the seven dumb sons who get their butts kicked by a demon. I hate to almost side with a demon here, but I can’t help but feel that those guys got exactly what they deserved. It’s foolish to go messing around with demons when you have no idea what you’re doing, especially if you’re treating it almost like a game like these guys were doing. They’re lucky they got off with just a good butt-kicking, and didn’t wind up getting demon-possessed themselves. Also, it’s interesting that the demon knew Paul’s name, and evidently had some respect for it.
Re: people confessing their sins. I guess it’s necessary to confess them first before you can repent of them. The Catholics still have a confession/repentance ritual that everyone is supposed to do every so often, but it involves *privately* confessing your sins to a single person (the priest), rather than publicly telling your sins to all and sundry. Personally, I’d much rather do it privately.
Re: the magic scrolls. On the one hand, I’m always sad to see any books (or scrolls) destroyed. But on the other hand, if there’s no such thing as demons, evil spirits, etc., then all the “knowledge” in those scrolls was bunk anyway. In that case, burning them would be about equivalent to burning a couple hundred copies of Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Nothing worth shedding a tear over. On the flipside, if demons are real, and the Ephesians and bible-folk in general obviously believed that they were, then knowledge of how to contact or manipulate them would be considered very dangerous. In that case it would be more similar to having manuals for how to build nuclear warheads just out and about in everyday circulation. Is any knowledge “too dangerous” to let exist? Personally I lean towards “no”, but I can see why in some cases you might want to severely curtail access to certain knowledge, such as “how to build nuclear reactors”, “how to breed and disseminate Yersinia Pestis”, “how to contact malignant, powerful supernatural forces who fyi are evil”, etc. From a historical standpoint it would have been sort of cool to be able to see what they believed back then, as far as “magic scrolls”, but to be honest I mostly don’t care. Given how self-serving and foolish all the sorcerers we’ve met so far have been (remember Elymas? the seven sons here in Acts aren’t exactly Mensa material, either), I highly doubt that they really possessed any worthwhile information about their art. It’s also important to note that Paul didn’t make them burn their scrolls, they decided to do so on their own.
Also, according to the notes a drachma was about a day’s wages. In modern money, if we estimate a day’s wages to be $7.25 minimum wage * 8 hours = $58 for a day’s wages, then 50,000 drachmas = 50,000 days’ wages, or 50,000 * $58 = $2.9 million. That’s just ridiculous, really; who on earth has $3 million worth of any type of book, let alone $3 million of magic books? I’m a little skeptical of the notes’ statement that a drachma was about equivalent to a day’s wages. Of course, my conversion into modern money is also highly unscientific and probably wrong. But either way you slice it, fifty thousand silver coins is a ton of money. The notes say that the books were highly expensive not because of their quality, but because of the power that they supposedly granted the owner. So instead of being a pile of, say, fifty thousand cheap 1-drachma scrolls, it would more likely have been a smaller pile with a few hundred very expensive scrolls. One wonders who made these scrolls, and how popular the practice of magic must have been for there to be so many of them. Or, could these have been scrolls about practices, rituals etc of other gods, that the christian Luke just lumped in as “magic” in his description.
Anyways, I’m way overthinking this again. Long story short, the more mystical residents of Ephesus were clearly impressed enough by Paul that they were willing to sacrifice thousands of pieces of silver’s worth of stuff to join him.
Re Paul’s helper Timothy, this is probably the same Timothy who travelled around with Paul on Paul’s first journey and went off to Corinth with Silas last chapter. The city of Ephesus was home to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. The famous temple was a giant tourist draw, and many of Ephesus’ craftsmen made a tidy living selling trinkets, jewelry, etc of Artemis to tourists. If Artemis followers start dumping Artemis for Jesus, the tourist trade based on the Temple of Artemis would dry up. They could switch over to selling Jesus trinkets instead of pagan trinkets, but without the Temple the big tourist draw would be gone. Plus it seems like at least some of them have a genuine devotion to Artemis, and are driven by more idealistic than monetary reasons.
The Jews didn’t worship Artemis any more than the Christians did, which is why when the Jewish Alexander tried to speak to the mob they quickly shut him down. The text’s wording is a little vague when it says that Alexander was speaking “in defense”, but it seems that he must have actually been about to defend Paul. Which is quite surprising given that the Jews have been mostly antagonistic towards Paul. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, I guess.
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