Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ

by David Francis Bacon

[♠] removed duplicate word “he”

“xviii. 24. Apollos. A name contracted from Apollonius, (which is read in the Cod. Cant.) as Epaphras from Epaphroditus, and Artemas from Artemonius. Of this Apollonius, mention is also made in 1 Corinthians i. 12. iii. 5 seq. where Paul speaks of the labor he underwent in the instruction of the Corinthians. (1 Corinthians iv. 6. xvi. 12.) Γένει, by birth, i. e. country; as in 18, 2. The Jews of Alexandria were eminent for Biblical knowledge. That most celebrated city of Egypt abounded with men of learning, both Jews and Gentiles.” Kuinoel. (Bloomfield’s Annotations, Vol. IV. p. 608.)

“The Baptism of John is put, by synecdoche, for the whole of John’s ordinances. See the note on Matthew xxi. 25. (Kuinoel.) It is generally supposed that he had been baptized by John himself: but this must have been twenty years before; and it is not probable that during that time he should have acquired no knowledge of Christianity. It should rather seem that he had been baptized by one of John’s disciples; and perhaps not very long before the time here spoken of.” (Bloomfield’s Annotations, Vol. IV. p. 610.)

“With respect to the letters here mentioned, they were written for the purpose of encouraging Apollos, and recommending him to the brethren. This ancient ecclesiastical custom of writing letters of recommendation, (which seems to have originated in the necessary caution to be observed in times of persecution, and arose out of the interrupted and tardy intercourse which, owing to their great distance from each other, subsisted between the Christians,) has been well illustrated by a tract of Ferrarius de Epistolis Ecclesiasticis, referred to by Wolf.” (Bloomfield. Vol. IV. p. 611.)

“Ephesus was the metropolis of proconsular Asia. It was situated at the mouth of the river Cayster, on the shore of the Aegean sea, in that part anciently called Ionia, (but now Natolir,) and was particularly celebrated for the temple of Diana, which had been erected at the common expense of the inhabitants of Asia Proper, and was reputed one of the seven wonders of the world. In the time of Paul, this city abounded with orators and philosophers; and its inhabitants, in their gentile state, were celebrated for their idolatry and skill in magic, as well as for their luxury and lasciviousness. Ephesus is now under the dominion of the Turks, and is in a state of almost total ruin, being reduced to fifteen poor cottages, (not erected exactly on its original site,) and its once flourishing church is now diminished to three illiterate Greeks. (Revelation ii. 6.) In the time of the Romans, Ephesus was the metropolis of Asia. The temple of Diana is said to have been four hundred and twenty-five feet long, two hundred and twenty broad, and to have been supported by one hundred and twenty-seven pillars of marble, seventy feet high, whereof twenty-seven were most beautifully wrought, and all the rest polished. One Ctesiphon, a famous architect, planned it, and with so much art and curiosity, that it took two hundred years to finish it. It was set on fire seven times; once on the very same day that Socrates was poisoned, four hundred years before Christ.” (Horne’s Introduction. Whitby’s Table. Wells’s Geography. Williams on Pearson.)

After this successful effort to confirm and complete the conversions already effected, Paul went about his apostolic labors in the usual way,——going into the synagogue, and speaking boldly, disputing the antiquated sophistry of the Jews, and urging upon all, the doctrines of the new revelation. In this department of labor, he continued for the space of three months; but at the end of that time, he found that many obstacles were thrown in the way of the truth by the stubborn adherents of the established forms of old Judaism, who would not allow that the lowly Jesus was the Messiah for whom their nation had so long looked as the restorer of Israel. Leaving the hardened and obstinate Jews, he therefore, according to his old custom in such cases of the rejection of the gospel by them, withdrew from their society, and thenceforth went with those who had believed among the more candid Greeks, who, with a truly enlightened and philosophical spirit, held their minds open to the reception of new truths, even though they might not happen to accord with those which were sanctioned to them by the prejudices of education. After leaving the synagogue, his new place of preaching and religious instruction was the school of one Tyrannus,——doubtless one of those philosophical institutions with which every Grecian city abounded. This continued his field of exertion for two years, during which his fame became very widely established,——all the inhabitants of Ionic and Aeolic Asia, having heard of the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks. Among the causes and effects of this general notoriety, was the circumstance, that many miraculous cures were wrought by the hands of Paul; and many began even to attach a divine regard to his person;——handkerchiefs being brought to the sick from his body, which, on application to those afflicted, either with bodily or mental diseases, produced a perfect cure. This matter becoming generally known and talked of, throughout Ephesus, became the occasion of a ludicrous accident, which occurred to some persons who entertained the mistaken notion, that this faculty of curing diseases was transferable, and might be exercised by anybody that had enterprise enough to take the business in hand, and say over the form of words that seemed to be so efficacious in the mouth of Paul. A set of conjurers of Jewish origin, the seven sons of Sceva, who went about professedly following the trade of casting out devils, straightway caught up this new improvement on their old tricks, (for so they esteemed the divinely miraculous power of the apostle,) and soon found an opportunity to experiment with this, which they considered a valuable addition to their old stock of impositions. So, calling over the miserable possessed subject of their foolish experiment, they said——“We exorcise you by Jesus, whom Paul preaches.” But the devil was not slow to perceive the difference between this second-hand, plagiaristic mode of operation, and the commanding tone of divine authority with which the demoniacal possessions were treated by the apostle of Jesus. He therefore quite turned their borrowed mummery into a jest, and cried out through the mouth of the possessed man,——“Jesus I know, and Paul I know:——but who are ye?” Under the impulse of the frolicsome, mischievous spirit, the man upon whom they were playing their conjuring tricks, jumped up at once, and fell upon these rash doctors with all his might, and with all the energy of a truly crazy demoniac, beat the whole seven, tore their clothes off from them, and threshed them to such effect, that they were glad to stop their mummery, and make off as fast as possible, but did not escape till they were naked and wounded. The affair of course, was soon very generally talked of, and the story made an impression, on the whole, decidedly favorable to the true source of that miraculous agency, which, when foolishly tampered with, had produced such appalling results. Many, among both Jews and Greeks, were thereby led to repentance and faith, and more particularly those who had been in the way of practising these arts of imposition. A very general alarm prevailed among all the conjurers, and many came and confessed the mean tricks by which they had hitherto maintained their reputation as controllers of the powers of the invisible world. Many who had also, at great expense of time and money, acquired the arts of imposition, brought the costly books in which were contained all the mysterious details of their magical mummery, and burned them publicly, without regard to their immense estimated pecuniary value, which was not less than nine thousand dollars. In short, the results of this apparently trifling occurrence, followed up by the zealous preaching of Paul, effected a vast amount of good, so that the word of God mightily grew and prevailed.

EPHESUS.——Ruins of the Temple of Diana.
Ephesians i. 1. Revelation ii. 1, 7.

“In Acts xx. 31, the apostle says, that for the space of three years he preached at Ephesus. Grotius and Whitby hold that these three years are to be reckoned from his first coming to Ephesus, xviii. 19; that he does not specify his being in any other city; and that when it is said here, ‘So that all Asia heard the word,’ xix. 40, it arose from the concourse that, on a religious account, continually assembled in that city. The Jews also, from different parts of Asia, were induced by commerce, or obliged by the courts of judicature, to frequent it. Other commentators contend that, as only two years, with three months in the synagogue, are here mentioned, the remaining three-quarters of a year were partly engaged in a progress through the neighboring provinces. (Elsley, from Lightfoot and Doddridge.)

“While he was at Ephesus, ‘God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul; so that from his body were brought unto the sick, handkerchiefs or aprons,’ &c. &c. Acts [♦]xix. 11, 12. Σιμικίνθιον, aprons, is slightly changed from the Latin semicinctum, which workmen put before them when employed at their occupations, to keep their clothes from soiling. The difference which Theophylact and Oecumenius make between these and σουδάρια, is, that the latter are applied to the head, as a cap or veil, and the former to the hands as a handkerchief. ‘They carry them,’ says Oecumenius, ‘in their hands, to wipe off moisture from their face, as tears,’” &c. &c. (Calmet’s Commentary.)