What Happens:
Paul and Silas head to Derbe and Lystra in southern Turkey, revisiting places where Paul and Barnabas had established local churches on their earlier mission trip. In Lystra there’s a convert named Timothy, whose mother is Jewish and whose father is Greek. Everyone in Lystra speaks very highly of Timothy, so Paul decides to recruit him to join he and Silas on their travels. Paul circumcises Timothy because of the Jews in that area, who all know that his father is greek. As they go from town to town they spread the news of the Apostles’ letter.
The trio travel through Galatia and Phrygia, but are prevented by the Holy Spirit from entering the province of Asia, on the eastern edge of Turkey. When they get to the border of Mysia, they try to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus blocks them. They bypass the place and go to the city of Troas, on the coast, where they are joined by the disciple Luke. That night Paul has a vision of a Macedonian man begging Paul to come to Macedonia. Paul concludes that God is calling them to preach the gospel there, so they immediately set sail for the islands of Samothrace, in the Aegean sea between Turkey and Greece/Macedonia, and then to Neapolis, on the southern coast of Macedonia. From there they head a few miles west to Philippi, the biggest city in the region, and stay there several days.
That Sabbath, the four head to a nearby river to pray, and wind up talking to a group of women who are there. They begin to tell the message of Jesus. One of the women is a seller of purple cloth named Lydia, who is a worshiper of God. The Lord opens her heart to Paul’s message, and she and her family are baptized. She invites the group to stay at her family’s home, and they accept.
On another day, Paul, Luke, Timothy, and Silas are walking to the river, and encounter a slave girl who is possessed by a spirit by which she predicts the future. She makes a good deal of money for her owners by fortune telling. The girl follows Paul and the group around, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She keeps this up for many days. Finally Paul gets so fed up that he wheels around and commands, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” and banishes the spirit from her.
The girl’s owners get quite angry because they won’t be able to make any money off her fortune-telling anymore, and they seize Paul and Silas and drag them to the authorities, claiming that the pair “are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.” The magistrates order Paul and Silas to be stripped and severely beaten, and afterwards they are put in prison. The jailer is commanded to watch them carefully, so he puts them in the innermost cell and chains their feet.
At midnight that night, Paul and Silas are praying and singing hymns while the other prisoners listen, when suddenly there is a violent earthquake. The foundation shakes, the prison doors open, and the chains in the walls come loose. The jailer wakes up and when he sees the prison door wide open he grabs his sword and prepares to kill himself, thinking that all the prisoners have escaped and that he will be executed. But Paul shouts to him, “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!”
Shocked, the jailer calls for lights, and when he sees Paul and Silas there he falls before them and asks what he must do to be saved. They tell him, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” They explain the word of the Lord to him and his household. The jailer washes their wounds, and then he and his family get baptized. He fixes a meal for Paul and Silas, and is filled with joy because he and his family have come to believe in God.
When morning comes around, the magistrates tell the jailer to release Paul and Silas, and that they are free to “go in peace”. But Paul counters, “They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out.” The magistrates get scared when they find out that Paul and Silas are Roman citizens. To appease them, they do what Paul wants and escort them from the prison, and, suddenly polite, request them to please leave the city. Paul and Silas go to Lydia’s house, where they meet “the brothers” and encourage them, before leaving Philippi.
Commentary
Paul has Timothy circumcised? Why? We just spent all of last chapter explaining why circumcision is no longer necessary, yet as soon as Paul leaves Antioch that’s the first thing he does? What’s the deal, and what does having neighboring Jews know his father was greek have anything to do with it?
According to the notes, Paul circumcised him “as a matter of expediency so that his work among the Jews might be more effective.” Not because either of them believed it was necessary for salvation. Apparently Paul’s thought process was that if they followed this particular law that the Jews believed was especially important, then they would have a better shot at converting them (especially since his father was greek and so Timothy must have extra faith to follow the Jewish tradition of circumcision.) My response to that is, how would the Jews ever know whether he’s circumcised or not? They would never know unless he told them. It’s not like they’re ever going to, uh, see for themselves. So I’m puzzled as to the actual usefulness of this.
Here is a map of Paul & Co.’s journey: They started the chapter in Derbe/Lystra (although this map shows them starting in Jerusalem, where they received the Apostles’ letter last chapter, and then headed to Antioch to deliver said letter, before heading to Derbe where we start in this chapter). They end the chapter in Philippi. Sorry for the tiny map.
The province of Asia that they were prevented from entering isn’t labelled, but would be the region in between Ephesus and Mysia. Bithynia and Mysia are neighboring provinces, although they’re shown kind of far apart on the map.
Not sure how the Holy Spirit would have kept them from entering. The notes suggest that it could have been through visions, through circumstance (I get mental images of Verin’s ta’veren-induced trip to Mat’s army (if you’re not a WoT fan, just ignore that)), simple good sense on the part of Paul & co. (e.g. seeing how crappy things were in certain places and deciding to take it as a sign that they should pass by, although Paul is so stubborn and gung-ho about preaching that I doubt he’d be deterred), or through other ways. Whatever it was, it was apparently intended to steer Paul & crew toward Macedonia, in keeping with Paul’s subsequent dream. Also, apparently the “Spirit of Jesus” is the Holy Spirit.
And also, apparently Luke joins them now. It never actually says in the text that Luke joins them; it only changes from saying that “they” (Paul, Silas, and Timothy) did stuff, to saying that “we” did stuff. Since Luke is the author of Acts, I take this to mean that he joined the group. To refresh our memory, Luke was a doctor and was either Greek, or, if Jewish, thoroughly Hellenized. He never knew Jesus and was recruited after Jesus’ Ascension. He wrote the gospel of Luke, and the book of Acts, probably sometime around 60AD, which would be about 10 years after the events of this chapter. This is… actually the first time that we’ve seen Luke. As far as I can tell, our only previous exposure to him was in the intro sections for Acts and the gospel of Luke. This is the first time we’ve seen him “in person”. It’s possible that this is where and when he was converted. Also, it turns out that yesterday was his feast day.
Philippi is named after Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great.
According to the notes about the group of women at the river, “There were so few Jews in Philippi that there was no synagogue (ten married men were required), so the Jews who were there met for prayer along the banks of the Gangites River. It was customary for such places of prayer to be located outdoors near running water.” However, if that’s what this was – Paul & co. stumbling across the city’s handful of Jews while out praying – why is no mention made of the men? I can understand if the women and men were segregated and the women went off to one place to pray and the men went off somewhere else, but I’m sure Paul, Silas, and the others would have wanted to talk to everybody they could find. Perhaps they did talk to the men, but were rejected, since it sometimes seems that women join the faith more easily than men do. That’s all assuming that these women were even Jewish anyway. Given how quickly they converted, I sort of doubt that they were, since Jews uniformly have been pretty negative to the christian message so far in Acts, irrespective of gender. It says that Lydia was a “worshiper of God”, which according to the notes means that she was a gentile who believed in the God of the Jews but had not become a full convert.
Not sure why only Paul and Silas were arrested, and not the whole group. Maybe because those two were the most senior.
If I were a prisoner, I don’t know that I’d have the self-control to NOT ESCAPE when the doors are wide open, the chains are literally falling out of the walls, and the jailer is so providentially asleep. I would have been out that door in five seconds flat, y’all. I can sort of see why maybe Paul and Silas wouldn’t, if they’ve got stuff still to do at the prison that they think is more important, but why not the other prisoners? Maybe there were more guards around after all, or something. Maybe some DID escape, but were low-value enough prisoners that nobody cared (firebrand revolutionaries like Paul are way higher on the scale of “people we want to keep in jail” than, say, some kid who shoplifted grapes at the market or whatever.) Anyway, I’m curious as to who actually baptized the jailer. (Who, incidentally, apparently lives either above the prison or right next door, seeing as how he’s got his whole family right there.) Surely he didn’t make Paul and Silas do it, since they were injured and he had just patched them up himself.
I have to admit that when I first read that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens, I was not terribly impressed. I was thinking of the US system where anybody who’s born inside the country is automatically a citizen, and assumed that the Roman system must have been the same or very similar, and if so, then any person (or at least, any man) born inside the Roman Empire must be a Roman citizen. How wrong I was! Turns out, the time period around Jesus’ birth was quite a period of upheaval, from a legal standpoint. The Roman Republic expanded rapidly in the second century BC – they started the century owning no land but Italy and Sicily, but after the Punic Wars with Carthage had conquered all of Carthage’s possessions in North Africa and Spain. In the middle of the second century they conquered Greece, Macedonia, and Pontus (in modern Turkey). In the middle of the first century BC, Julius Caesar conquered most of France, and Pompey conquered Judea and Syria. Over a dozen rebellions also took place during this time. Long story short, going from “just Italy” to “half of Europe” within such a short time span proved more pressure than the Republic could withstand, and after some sharp internal fighting Rome emerged as an Empire in 27BC, with Augustus as the first Emperor.
Back to our citizenship issues, when Rome first started expanding, the only people who were Roman citizens were people who were literally, uh, from Rome. When they conquered the rest of Italy, they did not change this definition. When they conquered Carthage and Spain they did not change this definition. When they conquered… well, you get the idea. Despite their vast territories, only a tiny fraction of the total population were Roman citizens. Their armies were mostly not-from-Rome (because obviously one city can only produce so many people, and you need hundreds of thousands of soldiers), and the Italian cities especially got angry about being denied citizenship. In true Roman fashion, they fought a war over it (the Social War in 91BC), and the Romans gave in and allowed the other Italian tribes to have full Roman citizenship.
Citizenship conferred a myriad of rights, including the right to vote (although in many cases you had to physically travel to Rome to exercise that right), the right to run for and hold public office, the right to have your children counted as citizens themselves, the right to a lawful trial, the right that if found guilty at trial, you could not be tortured or whipped, could not receive the death penalty for any crime other than treason, and could not be crucified as a form of execution. (wiki article) However, even though the other Italians got citizenship, hardly anyone else did. So all the newly conquered territories, such as Judea, were still not citizens.
However, even though their region didn’t get a blank check of universal citizenship like Italy did, it was still possible for individual people to earn citizenship in various ways. Service in the Roman Legions could earn you citizenship. The historian Josephus earned citizenship for serving the Emperor. Regional nobles and client kings were often granted citizenship. Also, there were various “lower” levels of citizenship as well. Even though very few people were full citizens, a larger number were eligible for “Latin Rights“, a sort of intermediate step between full citizenship and non-citizenship. It conferred almost all the rights of full citizenship except the right to vote, and it also allowed the right-holder to acquire full citizenship if they held municipal office. It was granted mostly to settlers, to encourage colonization of all Rome’s shiny new territories.
Anyways, long story short, the only way Paul could have been a citizen would be by individual grant – i.e. he or his parents had to have earned it – because the territory of Judea was not granted blanket citizenship, the way Italy was. In fact, Italy is pretty much the only place that was, so if you want to be BORN a Roman citizen, you have to be born in Italy. Period. Everyone else has to earn it on their own. Most likely, Paul’s parents earned citizenship, and Paul only inherited it. (He seems pretty young, and he’s spent most of his life studying the torah and all that, so he hasn’t really had much time to go off gallivanting with the Legion or whatever.) His parents could have earned it in a variety of ways: Legion service (unlikely, but you never know), service to the Republic (or Empire, depending whether it was before or after 27BC), or they could have been appointed it when Judea was conquered (which occurred in the 50’s BC, so it probably would have been Paul’s grandparents, making Paul a third-generation inheritor of citizenship.) Paul’s family is rich, and the Romans usually schmoozed the upper class so that they could use them as puppet-rulers to control the lower classes, so IMHO that’s the most likely way his citizenship came about. Either that, or he doesn’t actually have full citizenship, he only has the lesser (and easier to get) Latin Rights, but is passing himself off as a full citizen.
Re “the brothers”, I have no idea who that’s referring to, unless Lydia has some brothers. I don’t think Timothy and Luke are brothers.
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