2. Paul and Silas in South Galatia; Timothy Joins Them (16:1–4)
1Then he arrived1 at Derbe and Lystra. Now at the latter place there was a disciple named2 Timothy, the son of a Jewish woman who was a believer, although his father was a Greek.
2Timothy received a good report from the brothers at Lystra and Iconium.
3Paul wished him to set out as his companion, so he took him and circumcised him because of the Jews in those places. (Everyone knew that his father was a Greek.)
4As they went through the cities, then, they handed over the decrees which had been decided upon by the apostles and elders at Jerusalem.3
1–2 Having passed through Cilicia, Paul and Silas crossed the Taurus range by the pass called the Cilician Gates,4 and after traversing part of the territory of Antiochus IV, king of Commagene,5 they entered the south-eastern region of the province of Galatia. There they visited the cities which had been evangelized by Paul and Barnabas two or three years previously—Derbe, Lystra, Iconium, and (probably) Pisidian Antioch.
At Lystra6 (the common term in “Derbe and Lystra” of v. 1 and “Lystra and Iconium” of v. 2) Paul decided to take along as his personal companion a young man named Timothy who with his mother had come to faith in Christ during the previous missionary visit and who had since then made promising progress in the Christian life. That the brothers in Lystra and Iconium should have known him better than those in Lystra and Derbe is quite natural: Lystra was much nearer to Iconium than to Derbe, although Lystra and Derbe were Lycaonian cities and Iconium was in Phrygia.
The statement that Timothy’s mother (Eunice by name, according to 2 Tim. 1:5) had married a Gentile suggests that there was less rigid social segregation among the Jews of central Asia Minor than among those of Palestine. In Phrygia, says Ramsay, “there can be little doubt that the Jews married into the dominant families”;7 and the same may well have been true in Lycaonia.
3 It was Timothy’s mixed parentage that made Paul decide to circumcise him before taking him along as his junior colleague. By Jewish law Timothy was a Jew, because he was the son of a Jewish mother, but because he was uncircumcised he was technically an apostate Jew. If Paul wished to maintain his links with the synagogue, he could not be seen to countenance apostasy.8 He set his face implacably against any move to circumcise Gentile believers like Titus (Gal. 2:3–5), but Timothy was in a different situation. For Paul, circumcision in itself was a matter of indifference (Gal. 5:6; 6:15); only when it was regarded as a condition of acceptance with God did it involve a lapse from grace and the obligation to keep the whole law of Moses (Gal. 5:3–4). Timothy’s circumcision was a minor surgical operation carried out for a practical purpose—his greater usefulness in the ministry of the gospel. No doubt Paul was charged with inconsistency for his action (as he has been charged in more recent times); but the consistency which some would like to impose on Paul is that “foolish consistency” which R. W. Emerson describes as “the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”9 Those who deplore the absence of this consistency from Paul miss the higher consistency which aimed at bringing all the activities of his life and thought “into captivity to the obedience of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5) and at subordinating every other interest to the paramount interests of the gospel (1 Cor. 9:23).
There are indications in the Pastoral Epistles that the leaders of Timothy’s home church associated themselves with Paul in commissioning him for the gospel ministry.10
4 Since 15:40 the successive verbs have been in the singular number, with Paul as subject. Now the plural is used: “they handed over the decrees.” This was Silas’s duty, not Paul’s.11 The decrees indeed had been addressed expressly to the Gentile believers of Antioch and of Syria and Cilicia, not of South Galatia; since, however, the cities now being visited had been evangelized from Antioch, it might have been argued that they were included by implication. But, if the churches in these cities were those to which Paul’s letter to the Galatians had only recently been sent, how would they have reacted to the delivery of directives from Jerusalem by Paul’s fellow-traveler? Paul himself, as we have seen, never invokes the Jerusalem “decrees” when he deals with the practices which they forbid.12 There are reasons for doubting if this verse is part of the original text of Acts.13
4. The Churches Grow in Faith and Numbers (16:5)
5So the churches were established in their faith and increased in number day by day.
5 A crucial phase of Luke’s narrative is now concluded with the third of six brief reports of progress. The scene of action shifts to the Aegean world.
1. The Call from Macedonia (16:6–10)
6So they passed through14 the Phrygian and Galatian region: they had been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.
7When they came opposite Mysia, they tried to make their way into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus15 did not allow them;
8so they passed by Mysia and came down to the sea at Troas.16
9Here a vision appeared to Paul by night: a man of Macedonia was standing and appealing to him, “Come over into Macedonia and help us.”
10When he had seen the vision, we immediately sought means to set out for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.17
6 Paul’s missionary journeys display an extraordinary combination of strategic planning and keen sensitiveness to the guidance of the Spirit of God, however that guidance was conveyed—by prophetic utterance, inward prompting, or the overruling of external circumstances. On this occasion his intention had probably been, after visiting the churches planted in South Galatia by Barnabas and himself, to continue along the westward road to Ephesus. But the Spirit forbade him and his associates to take this road. The prohibition was evidently given before they passed through the “Phrygian and Galatian region”18 (probably the Phrygian territory incorporated in the province of Galatia, in which Iconium and Pisidian Antioch lay);19 it perhaps took the form of a prophetic utterance in the church at Lystra. The Spirit, we may observe, gave them ample warning to change their plans.
7–8 If the province of Asia was not to be the field of their immediate evangelistic activity, then it was natural for them to cast their eyes farther north, and think of the highly civilized province of Bithynia in northwest Asia Minor, with its Greek cities (of which Nicomedia and Nicaea were the most important) and Jewish settlements.20 So, instead of continuing west to Ephesus, they turned north (probably from Pisidian Antioch), crossed the Sultan Daǧ range, and arrived at Philomelium (modern Akșehir). From there they struck northwest, taking one of two possible routes leading through Asian Phrygia. We could plot the remainder of their journey more certainly if we knew where they received the second divine monition, warning them away from Bithynia. If “over against Mysia” or “opposite Mysia” means, as Ramsay put it, “when they had reached such a point that a line drawn across the country at right angles to the general line of their route would touch Mysia,”21 then they would have arrived at one or the other of the road-junctions Dorylaeum (modern Eskișehir) or (more probably) Cotiaeum (modern Kütahya), and instead of continuing north into Bithynia turned west until they reached the sea at Troas.22
In saying that this second prohibition was imposed by “the Spirit of Jesus,” does Luke suggest some significance in the change of terminology? It was the same Spirit who forbade them to “speak the word in Asia,” but the fact that on this occasion he is called “the Spirit of Jesus” may indicate that his guidance was now given through a prophecy uttered expressly in the name of Jesus. Paul and Silas were both prophets,23 and available for use by the Spirit or by the exalted Lord for the declaration of his will.
9 Troas—Alexandria Troas (to give it its full name)—was founded at the end of the fourth century B.C. and remained a free city until Augustus gave it the status of a Roman colony. It was a regular port of call for vessels journeying between proconsular Asia and Macedonia (cf. 20:5) and was an important center in the Roman system of communications. Traces of its harbor and other buildings may still be seen at Dalyan.24
At Troas, then, the series of divine prohibitions gave way to a positive direction. The direction this time took the form of a night vision seen by Paul. In this vision a man of Macedonia stood appealing to Paul to cross over to Macedonia and help the people there. Macedonia, which became the dominant power in the Greek world and Western Asia under Philip II and Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., had been a Roman province since 146 B.C. It is needless to ask how Paul recognized the man to be a Macedonian: his request, “Come over into Macedonia and help us,” indicated his nationality clearly enough.
10 At this point the narrator shows unobtrusively that he himself now joined the missionary party as a fourth member, by continuing the story in the first person plural instead of the third. In the prologue to the Third Gospel (which was designed as the prologue to the whole of Luke-Acts), he claims to have kept in touch with the events related “for some time back”; the “some time back” goes back at least to this point.25 Here, then, the first of the “we” sections of Acts begins. No other explanation of them is so probable as that the “we” which characterizes them includes the “I” of the prologues to Luke and Acts. A writer incorporating into his narrative the diary of some personal eyewitness other than himself would scarcely have done so in such an artless way.26 If the narrator was Luke the physician of Col. 4:14, we may wonder if he was practising his profession in Troas at the time, or waiting to be signed on as a ship’s doctor; but we have no means of knowing. At any rate, he accompanied Paul, Silas, and Timothy to Macedonia, having taken part in the joint decision to go there in response to Paul’s vision.
If Paul’s original plan had been to evangelize the eastern shore of the Aegean by planting Christianity in Ephesus, “that great metropolis in which the East looked out upon the West,”27 then the plan was only postponed, not jettisoned altogether. But first he was directed to the western shore of the Aegean, to plant the faith in Philippi, Thessalonica, Beroea, and Corinth before he settled in Ephesus. Strategic points on the circumference of the circle of which Ephesus was the center were to be evangelized first—in Macedonia and Achaia as well as in South Galatia—and then he was to complete his work in that whole area by nearly three years’ ministry at the center. The Spirit’s interventions did not frustrate Paul’s strategy, but enhanced its effectiveness.
2. Troas to Philippi (16:11–12a)
11Setting sail28 from Troas, then, we had a straight run to Samothrace, and the next day (we came) to Neapolis.
12aFrom there we went to Philippi, a city of the first district of Macedonia,29 a Roman colony.
11 The wind was favorable for the voyage across the North Aegean, and they finished it in two days. (The reverse journey from Philippi to Troas, recorded in 20:6, took five days.) On the evening of the first day they reached Samothrace, a mountainous island rising to 5,000 feet, which forms a conspicuous landmark. In religious history the chief importance of Samothrace lies in its being the seat of a widely patronized mystery cult, the worship of the Cabiri, which had been practised there from time immemorial. Paul and his friends did not linger there, however; the next day their ship took them to Neapolis, on the mainland. Neapolis, the modern Kavalla, was the port of Philippi, which lay some ten miles inland. At Neapolis the great Egnatian Way, a Roman road linking the Adriatic with the Aegean, reached its eastern terminus.30 Luke likes to note the ports of arrival and departure, and in the “we” sections he is specially careful to note the daily progress made during voyages.
12a Disembarking at Neapolis, the missionaries went on to Philippi along the Egnatian Way. This city received its name from Philip II, father of Alexander the Great, who seized the gold mines in the vicinity and fortified what had formerly been the Thasian settlement of Crenides. With the rest of Macedonia, Philippi passed under Roman control at the end of the Third Macedonian War in 168 B.C. At that time Macedonia was divided into four administrative districts or republics. Later, in 146 B.C., it was reduced to provincial status. Near Philippi was fought the battle in 42 B.C. which resulted in the victory of Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) over Brutus and Cassius, assassins of Julius Caesar.31 After the battle, the victors settled a number of their veterans at Philippi and made the city a Roman colony; Octavian settled further colonists there after his victory over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium in 31 B.C.
Luke describes Philippi as a city of the first district of Macedonia32—that is, the first of the four districts into which the former kingdom was divided by the Romans. While he refers to several other cities which are known to have been Roman colonies at the time, Philippi is the only one which he expressly calls a Roman colony.33 The details of its administration given in the ensuing narrative are those which were specially characteristic of such a colony. A Roman colony used Roman law, and its constitution was modeled on the municipal constitution of Rome.
3. The Faith of Lydia (16:12b–15)
12bIn this city we spent several days.
13On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the riverside to a place habitually used for prayer,34 and we sat down and talked to the women who had come together.
14One of the women, Lydia by name, a purple merchant from the city of Thyatira, listened carefully.35 The Lord opened her heart to pay heed to what Paul was saying.
15When she was baptized, with her household, she begged us, “If you have judged me to be a believer in the Lord, come into my house and stay there.” She would take no refusal.36
12b-13 At Philippi, then, they spent several days. When Paul visited a new city, it was his practice, as we have seen, to attend the local Jewish synagogue on the first sabbath after his arrival and seek an opportunity to make his message known there. At Philippi, however, there does not appear to have been a regular synagogue. That can only mean that there were very few resident Jews; had there been ten Jewish men, they would have sufficed to constitute a synagogue.37 No number of women could compensate for the absence of even one man necessary to make up the quorum of ten. There was, however, a place outside the city where a number of women—either of Jewish birth or Gentiles who worshiped the God of Israel—met to go through the appointed Jewish service of prayer for the sabbath day, even if they could not constitute a valid synagogue congregation. Paul and his companions found this place, by the bank of the river Gangites, and sat down with the women and told them the story of Jesus.
14–15 One of these women, a God-fearing Gentile, came from Thyatira in the province of Asia. Her name Lydia, “the Lydian woman,” reminds us that Thyatira lay in the territory of the ancient kingdom of Lydia. The people of that area were famed for their skill in the manufacture of purple dye, extracted from the juice of the madder root.38 This was still in use there for the dyeing of carpets at the end of the nineteenth century, before it was superseded by chemical dyes.39 Lydia had evidently come to Philippi as a trader in that dye. There is inscriptional evidence for the existence of a guild of purple merchants in Philippi.40 But she had possibly learned to worship the true God in her native Thyatira; there was probably a Jewish community there.41
As Paul and his friends spoke, Lydia believed what they said and acknowledged Jesus as Lord. She thus became Paul’s first convert in Europe. When she was baptized, together with her household (which would include her servants and other dependents as well as her family), she gave practical proof of her faith by pressing the four missionaries to become her guests. Women in Macedonia were noted for their independence; moreover, under Roman law (which governed life in the colony) freeborn women with three children and freedwomen with four children were at this time granted a number of privileges, including the right to undertake legal transactions on their own initiative.42
16Now, as we made our way to the place of prayer,43 we were encountered by a slave girl who was possessed by a pythonic spirit. She brought her owners much profit44 by her fortune-telling.
17She kept on following Paul and us, calling out as she did so, “These men are servants45 of God Most High; they are proclaiming the way of salvation to you!”46
18She did this for many days on end. Paul was annoyed, and turned and said to the spirit, “I command you in the name of Jesus Christ, Come out of her!” It came out there and then.
16 Three individuals are singled out by Luke among those whose lives were influenced for good by the gospel at Philippi; they differ so much one from another that he might be thought to have selected them deliberately in order to show how the saving power of the name of Jesus was shown in the most diverse types of men and women. The first is Lydia, the independent businesswoman of reputable character and God-fearing mind; as she heard the gospel, “the Lord opened her heart” and she believed it. The second is a person of a very different stamp: an unfortunate demon-possessed slave girl, whose owners exploited her condition for their material gain. She is described by Luke as “having a pythonic spirit” or being a “pythoness”—that is, a person inspired47 by Apollo, the Greek deity specially associated with the giving of oracles, who was worshiped as the “Pythian” god at the oracular shrine of Delphi in central Greece. His priestess there was the Pythian prophet par excellence; the girl of whom Luke speaks was a very pale reflection of her. This girl’s involuntary utterances were regarded as the voice of the god, and she was thus much in demand by people who wished to have their fortunes told or to receive information or advice which they believed could be supplied from such a source.
17 The slave girl’s deliverance demanded much more spectacular measures than Lydia’s quiet turning in heart to the Lord. Day by day, as the missionaries went to the place of prayer, she followed them through the streets of Philippi, advertising them aloud as servants of God Most High, who were bringing the way of salvation to the city. The title “God Most High” provided Jews and Gentiles with a convenient common denominator for the supreme being,48 and “salvation” in a religious sense was as eagerly sought by Gentiles as by Jews.49
18 The missionaries, however, did not appreciate her unsolicited testimonials, and at last Paul, vexed by her continual clamor, exorcized the spirit that possessed her, commanding it in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her. The words had scarcely left his lips when she was released from its power. The superior authority which such spirits had recognized when Jesus himself commanded them to leave their victims was equally recognized when his name was invoked by one of his disciples, and proved as potent in exorcism as in other forms of healing (cf. 3:6).
5. Paul and Silas Imprisoned (16:19–24)
19When her owners saw that their hope of profit50 had “come out” of her, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the forum51 before the magistrates.
20Bringing them before the praetors,52 they said, “These men are causing disturbance in our city. Jews as they are,
21they are proclaiming customs which we may neither accept nor practise, Roman citizens as we are.
22The crowd joined in attacking them, and the praetors tore off their cloaks and ordered them to be beaten with rods.
23When they had inflicted many strokes on them, they threw them into prison and charged the jailer to guard them securely.
24Receiving such a charge, he threw them into the inner prison and secured their feet in the stocks.
19 The good deed done to the slave girl was not at all to the liking of her owners; when Paul exorcized the spirit that possessed her, he exorcized their means of income: she could no longer tell fortunes. There is a literary parallel in one of the comedies of Menander in which a girl possessed not by Apollo but by Cybele laments the loss of her cymbals and tambourine and of her gift of prophecy, which depends on them.53 The righteous indignation of the Philippian slave girl’s owners was aroused at the missionaries’ wanton attack on the sacred rights of property (as they saw it).54 Moreover, the men who had infringed these rights were not Roman citizens like themselves (or so they thought); they were not even Greeks, like the population around them, but wandering Jews, engaged in propagating some variety of their own perverse superstition. They therefore dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates and lodged a complaint against them. Luke and Timothy were apparently unmolested: Paul and Silas were not only the leaders of the party but also most obviously Jews (Luke was a Gentile and Timothy a half-Gentile). Anti-Jewish sentiment lay very near the surface in pagan antiquity.
20–21 As Philippi was a Roman colony, its municipal administration, like that of Rome itself, was in the hands of two collegiate magistrates. The collegiate magistrates of a Roman colony were commonly called duumvirs, but in some places they preferred the more dignified title of praetors, and this is what the chief magistrates of Philippi were apparently called.55 Before the two praetors, then, Paul and Silas were dragged, and their accusers represented them as vagabond Jews who were causing disturbances in the city and inculcating customs which Roman citizens of all people could neither admit nor practise. Proselytization of Roman citizens by Jews was not positively illegal, so far as the evidence indicates,56 but it certainly incurred strong disapproval. The magistrates were bound in any case to take cognizance of such religious activity as threatened to provoke a breach of the peace or to encourage unlawful practices or organizations; and Paul and Silas were charged with precisely this kind of activity.
22 There was great indignation that Roman citizens should be molested by strolling peddlers of an outlandish religion. Such people had to be taught to know their proper place and not trouble their betters. There was no serious investigation of the charge: Paul and Silas were summarily stripped57 and handed over to the lictors—the magistrates’ police attendants—to be soundly beaten; the city jailer was then ordered to lock them up.
The lictors58 were the official attendants on the chief magistrates in Rome and other Roman cities. They carried as symbols of office bundles of rods, with an axe inserted among them in certain circumstances—the fasces et secures59—denoting the magistrates’ right to inflict corporal and, where necessary, capital punishment. It was with the lictors’ rods that the two missionaries were beaten on this occasion. It was not the only time that Paul had this treatment meted out to him: five or six years later he claims to have been beaten with rods three times (2 Cor. 11:25), although we have no information about the two other occasions.
23–24 When, after this severe beating, they were handed over to the jailer’s custody, he interpreted his instructions strictly and fastened their legs in the stocks, in the inmost part of the prison. These stocks had more than two holes for the legs, which could thus be forced apart in such a way as to cause the utmost discomfort and cramping pain.60 It was not the jailer’s business to take any thought for his prisoners’ comfort, but to make sure that they did not escape. He was possibly a retired soldier, and while service in the Roman army developed many fine qualities, these did not include the milk of human kindness. Yet this man is the third person in Philippi whom Luke describes as influenced by the saving power of Christ. He was a totally different character from both Lydia and the fortune-teller, and it took an earthquake and confrontation with death to make him take thought for his salvation; yet the same gospel as had blessed those two women now brought blessing to him.
6. Earthquake at Midnight: The Jailer’s Conversion (16:25–34)
25At midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.
26Suddenly there was a great earthquake; the foundations of the prison were shaken, all the doors were opened at once,61 and all the fetters were unfastened.
27The jailer woke up; when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was on the point of killing himself, for he thought the prisoners had escaped.
28But Paul called in a loud voice, “Don’t harm yourself; we are all here!”
29The jailer then called for lights, rushed in, and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas;
30he brought them out62 and said, “Gentlemen, what must I do to be saved?”
31“Believe on the Lord Jesus,”63 they replied, “and you will be saved—you and your household.”
32Then they spoke the word of the Lord64 to him, and to all those who were in his house.
33At that very hour of the night he took them and bathed their wounds;65 then he was baptized immediately, together with all those who belonged to him.
34Then he brought them up into his house and set food before them.66 Having believed in God, he rejoiced with all his household.
25 This paragraph bears the marks of being an independent narrative, inserted by Luke into the record of events at Philippi. He probably derived it from another source than its context: if verse 35 had followed immediately after verse 24, the reader would have been conscious of no hiatus.67 But we may be glad that Luke did add it at this point: it enriches his account of Paul’s Philippian ministry.
The double discomfort of the lictors’ rods and the stocks was not calculated to fill Paul and Silas with joy, but around midnight the other prisoners, as they listened, heard sounds coming from the inmost cell—sounds, not of groaning and cursing, but of prayer and hymn-singing. “The legs feel nothing in the stocks when the heart is in heaven,” says Tertullian.68 What sort of men were these?
26 Perhaps it was the awed impression which the two missionaries’ behavior produced on the other prisoners that enabled them to dissuade those others from making their escape while the going was good when a sudden earthquake shook the prison foundations, threw open the doors, and loosened the staples that attached the prisoners’ fetters to the walls.
27 The earthquake that rocked the prison foundations wakened the jailer out of his midnight sleep. Immediately he went to investigate his charge. The worst had happened: the prison doors were open; the prisoners, of course, had seized their opportunity and escaped. For a man brought up to a Roman soldier’s ideals of duty and discipline, only one honorable course was open—suicide.
28 But as he stood there, by the outer door of the prison, about to drive the point of his short sword into his throat or heart, his hand was arrested by a voice from the darkness within: “Don’t harm yourself; we are all here!” While he could see nothing as he looked into the darkness, those inside could see his figure silhouetted in the doorway and could see what he was about to do. Not only were Paul and Silas still there, but they had apparently restrained the other prisoners also. There was something uncanny about these two men!
29–30 So, calling for light, he rushed into the prison and brought Paul and Silas out. First, according to the Western reviser (who probably imagined what he himself would have done had he been in the jailer’s shoes), he prudently secured the other prisoners again.69 Then he earnestly asked Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved?”
How much he meant by this question it would be difficult to determine. He might have heard (or heard about) the fortune-teller’s announcement that these men had come to proclaim a “way of salvation”;70 if so, he might have seen in the earthquake a supernatural vindication of them and their message. What was involved in this salvation would not have been clear to him, but he was thoroughly shaken, in soul as well as in body, and if anyone could show him the way to peace of mind, release from fear, and a sense of security, Paul and Silas (he was convinced) could do so.
31–32 There and then the two missionaries assured him that faith in Jesus, the Lord whom they proclaimed, was the way of salvation for himself and his family. What was meant by faith in Jesus as Lord they proceeded to make plain to the whole household, presenting the gospel to them in terms which they could readily grasp.
33–34 This was the message they had lived for! With joy they embraced it at once. The jailer bathed the wounded backs of the two men, probably at a well in the prison courtyard, and there too he and his household were baptized. “He washed and was washed,” says Chrysostom: “he washed them from their stripes, and was himself washed from his sins.”71 If nothing is said explicitly of their receiving the Holy Spirit, this is implied in the emphasis on the rejoicing which filled the house.72
There, in the jailer’s house, into which Paul and Silas were brought up,73 they received hospitable treatment: food was set before them, and hosts and guests exulted together, united in Christian faith and love. The jailer was guilty of no dereliction of duty in thus taking two prisoners into his house; his responsibility was to produce them when called upon to do so. He had no reason to fear that they would run away and leave him in the lurch. Luke’s third example of the power of the gospel at Philippi is the most wonderful of all. And perhaps Paul and Silas reckoned the rods and the stocks well worth enduring for the joy that they shared in the jailer’s house.
7. Paul and Silas Leave Philippi (16:35–40)
35At daybreak74 the praetors sent the lictors with a message: “Release those men.”
36The jailer reported their words to Paul: “The praetors have sent word that you two are to be released; now then, depart and be on your way in peace.”75
37But Paul said to the lictors, “They have beaten us publicly, without a proper trial,76 Roman citizens as we are, and threw us into prison. Do they now think they can turn us out secretly? No indeed; let them come in person and escort us out.”
38The lictors reported these words to the praetors. The praetors were afraid when they learned that the men were Roman citizens,
39and they came77 and appealed to them; they brought them out and begged them to leave the city.
40So, leaving the prison, they went to Lydia’s house, where they saw the brothers78 and encouraged them; then they took their departure.
35 By the next morning the excitement of the previous day had died down. The praetors decided that the two vagabond Jews had been taught the necessary lesson by the lictors’ rods and the night in the lock-up. All that was required now was to release them and send them out of town; they would be in no hurry to come back. Imprisonment in itself was not a common penalty for breaches of civil law; by having Paul and Silas locked up overnight after their beating, the praetors had simply exercised their police right of coercitio—summary correction or chastisement. They now sent the lictors to the jail with orders to the jailer to set the two prisoners free.
36–37 But when the jailer reported this message to Paul and Silas and told them that they were at liberty to depart, Paul demurred. An injustice had been committed, and it must not be covered up in this way. He and his companion were Roman citizens—as good Roman citizens as the colonists and magistrates of Philippi—and their rights as Roman citizens had been grossly violated. The charges against them ought to have been properly investigated, but they had been beaten and imprisoned without any inquiry. By a series of Valerian and Porcian laws enacted between the beginning of the Roman Republic and the early second century B.C. Roman citizens were exempted from degrading forms of punishment and had certain valued rights established for them in relation to the law.79 These privileges had been more recently reaffirmed under the empire by a Julian law dealing with public disorder.80
Why then did not Paul appeal to his Roman citizenship the day before?81 The answer sometimes given, that it would have been embarrassing for him to have to claim privileges which Silas could not share, seems to be excluded by the plain implication of the present passage, that both Silas and he were Roman citizens. It may be that they did protest at the time, but that no one paid any attention to them in the excitement of the moment. A Roman citizen claimed his legal rights by the affirmation ciuis Romanus sum, “I am a Roman citizen.”82 It is uncertain if there was any documentary evidence which could be produced on the spot in confirmation of the claim. Paul was probably registered as a Roman citizen in the public record office at Tarsus, and a certified copy of the registration might be obtained, but did he carry this around with him wherever he went?83 At any rate, on this occasion Paul’s claim neatly turned the tables on the self-important complaint of his accusers, that respectable Roman citizens should not be disturbed by wandering Jews. If the praetors wanted them to leave Philippi, he said, let them come and show the courtesy due to Roman citizens, and not expel them in this hole-and-corner manner.
38–39 The lictors brought Paul’s message back to the praetors, who were dismayed to learn what, in yesterday’s excitement, they had failed to ascertain—that these two Jews were as good Roman citizens as themselves. If a complaint about their illegal treatment of these Roman citizens reached the ears of the authorities in Rome, they would be in an awkward position. Their self-importance was healthily deflated, as they went to the jail and requested Paul and Silas to leave Philippi. Roman citizens who had been convicted of no crime could not be expelled from a Roman city, but the responsibility of protecting two unpopular Roman citizens was more than the praetors felt able to undertake. They therefore apologized to Paul and Silas and escorted them out of the prison precincts, asking them to be good enough not to remain in Philippi any longer.
40 Being released from prison, they went to Lydia’s house and spoke words of encouragement to the Christians gathered there. Paul’s insistence on an official apology may have served in some degree as a protection to them for the time being. (That the Christians of Philippi had to endure persecution for their faith some years later is evident from Phil. 1:27–30.) Then Paul and Silas, with Timothy, departed from Philippi in the westward direction along the Egnatian Way. Luke perhaps stayed behind; at any rate he reappears in Philippi in 20:5–6, at the beginning of the second “we” section of Acts. He is possibly the “true yokefellow” to whom Paul addresses a special request in Phil. 4:3.84
The later history of the Philippian church makes pleasant reading. The same kindness as provided Paul and his friends with hospitality during their first visit to the city was shown in repeated gifts to Paul during his subsequent travels and Roman imprisonment (Phil. 4:10–16).85