[189] See pp. 32, 33 above for some remarks on this title, 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.
[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 anticipated, 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."
[191] I allude, of course, to the decree of Claudius against the Jews in A.D. 52, to which Suetonius (Claudius, 25) and Dio Cassius, 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 god 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," Γράμματα Ἐφέσια. These were mystic characters and strange words which were engraven on the crown, zone, and feet of the goddess. 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 passed over to the Manichæans and other secret sects of mediæval 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 quantities of these "Ephesian letters" have been found among the Fayûm Manuscripts discovered in Egypt, which almost universally make a large use of the name Iao or Jehovah, showing their contact with Judaism.
[194] This subject properly belongs to commentators on 1 Corinthians. Paley, in Horæ Paulinæ, 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.
[195] The student may consult on the identification of Artemis and the Oriental or Persian deity Anaïtis, the Revue Archéologique 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.
[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 Passover, the riot which hastened his departure must have happened within the succeeding fortnight. Bœckh, 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.