Paul on the Road

The pattern repeated across Paul's early travels begins here: arrival in a city, attendance at the synagogue on the Sabbath, and an invitation to speak (13:15). Paul's sermon rehearses Israel's history from Egypt through David to Jesus, argues from named scripture, Psalm 2, Psalm 16, and finally Habakkuk 1:5 as a warning, and offers forgiveness through Jesus that the law of Moses could not provide, 'Through Him everyone who believes is justified from everything from which you could not be justified by the law of Moses' (13:39).

The response splits sharply. The next Sabbath draws almost the whole city, and the Jewish leaders, 'filled with jealousy', blasphemously contradict what Paul is saying (13:45). Paul and Barnabas answer with a turn that is itself striking: 'It was necessary to speak the word of God to you first. But since you reject it and do not consider yourselves worthy of eternal life, we now turn to the Gentiles. For this is what the Lord has commanded us: "I have made you a light for the Gentiles, to bring salvation to the ends of the earth"' (13:46-47), applying Isaiah's servant-song language (Isaiah 49:6, and see the note on the BSB's capitalised pronouns in that chapter in the previous lesson) to their own present mission and not only to Israel's original calling or to Jesus alone.

Gentiles in the city, the text says, 'rejoiced and glorified the word of the Lord' (13:48), and the word spreads through the surrounding region, but persecution, stirred by the Jewish leaders together with religious women of prominence and the leading men of the city, drives Paul and Barnabas out (13:50). The same shape, synagogue, division, persecution, departure, recurs with local variation through Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, including Paul being stoned at Lystra and dragged outside the city, 'presuming he was dead', yet getting up and going back into the city the same day, before leaving for Derbe the next (14:19-20).

At Lystra, after Paul heals a man lame from birth, the crowd, speaking Lycaonian, a detail Luke records with some precision, hails Barnabas as Zeus and Paul as Hermes and prepares to offer sacrifice to them (14:11-13). Paul and Barnabas tear their clothes in protest and argue, not from scripture this crowd would not have known, but from creation itself: 'We too are only men, human like you. We are bringing you good news that you should turn from these worthless things to the living God, who made heaven and earth and sea and everything in them' (14:15), already anticipating the fuller version of this same argument that Athens will get.

Waiting in Athens, Paul is deeply disturbed in his spirit by a city 'full of idols' (17:16), and reasons daily in the synagogue and in the marketplace, drawing the attention of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, some of whom call him a spermologos (the BSB's 'babbler'), literally a seed-picker, a dismissive term for someone who scavenges scraps of ideas without real understanding, and he is brought to the Areopagus to explain himself. Whether this means a formal hearing before Athens's ancient council or simply a conversation at the hill and location that gave the council its name is genuinely unclear from the text, and commentators differ.

Paul's method starts from the altar with the inscription 'TO AN UNKNOWN GOD' (the BSB prints it in capitals, as an inscription), a detail that fits what other ancient writers report in general terms about altars to unknown or unnamed gods in Athens, though no surviving inscription matches his exact wording. He argues that God, who made the world, does not live in temples or need anything from human hands, since he himself gives life and breath to everyone, and that every nation was made from one common stock in order to seek him, 'though He is not far from each one of us' (17:27; the argument runs through 17:24-27).

The two quotations in 17:28 are worth naming precisely. The BSB puts both in quotation marks: 'For in Him we live and move and have our being' and 'We are His offspring.' Paul himself attributes only the second, 'As some of your own poets have said', so the marks on the first are the translators' judgment that it is also a quotation. The first line possibly echoes Epimenides of Crete, a poet also apparently quoted in Titus 1:12, and the second comes from the Phaenomena of Aratus, a Stoic poet from Paul's own home region of Cilicia. Paul reaches for lines his hearers already recognised and reads them toward a conclusion their original authors did not intend, a method sometimes called redemptive appropriation.

The result is mixed, and Luke reports it without dressing it up as a triumph. At the mention of the resurrection of the dead, some mock outright; others say only, 'We want to hear you again on this topic' (17:32). A small number believe, named individually, Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris (17:34). By the numbers given, Athens is one of Paul's least successful stops in the entire book.

Paul's ministry in Ephesus is extended and eventful: about twelve disciples who had known only John's baptism receive the Holy Spirit (19:1-7); Paul reasons daily for two years in the lecture hall of Tyrannus, 'so that everyone who lived in the province of Asia, Jews and Greeks alike, heard the word of the Lord' (19:9-10); extraordinary miracles occur; and seven itinerant sons of a Jewish chief priest named Sceva, attempting to use Jesus' name as a formula against a demon-possessed man, are instead overpowered and put to flight (19:13-16). Fear falls on the city, and many who had practised magic publicly burn their books, valued at fifty thousand drachmas, an extraordinary act of renunciation measured in real economic terms (19:17-19).

The disturbance that follows touches a trade, and a silversmith named Demetrius, whose business made shrines of the goddess Artemis, gathers fellow craftsmen and states the threat plainly: 'not only in Ephesus, but in nearly the whole province of Asia, this Paul has persuaded a great number of people to turn away. He says that man-made gods are no gods at all' (19:26). His speech leads with the trade's income and only then turns to the temple's honour, showing an economic grievance carried by religious language.

The riot follows: two hours of the crowd shouting, 'Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!' (19:28, 19:34), the disciples not allowing Paul to go before the assembly (19:30), and a resolution that comes not from any Christian but from the city clerk, whose speech distinguishes proper legal process, courts, proconsuls, a lawfully convened assembly, from an unauthorised mob, and warns that the city itself risks being charged with rioting by Rome (19:35-41). This civic assembly, ekklesia, is the very word the New Testament elsewhere uses for the church.

The episode closes without any triumphant Christian speech at all. Once the uproar ceases, Paul leaves for Macedonia (20:1), and the chapter's real interest lies in showing Rome's own civic order, not the church, defusing a crisis the gospel had provoked.

At four points in Acts, roughly 16:10-17, 20:5-15, 21:1-18, and 27:1-28:16, the narration shifts without any comment from 'he' and 'they' to 'we', consistently around sea travel with Paul, and shifts back to third person in between those stretches. This is a stable, repeated literary feature, and any account of how Acts was written has to explain it.

The traditional and still widely held reading takes the 'we' as marking the actual presence of the author, an eyewitness companion of Paul during those specific stretches, traditionally identified with Luke, 'the beloved physician' named in Colossians 4:14 and mentioned again in Philemon 24 and 2 Timothy 4:11. This reading also points to the shared preface and shared addressee, Theophilus, linking Luke's Gospel to Acts (Luke 1:1-4; Acts 1:1), and scholars such as Colin Hemer argued at length that geographical, administrative and titular details across the 'we' sections match what is independently known of the region with a precision that favours firsthand experience.

A source-critical reading, associated classically with Martin Dibelius, holds instead that the 'we' preserves an older travel document or itinerary that a later author incorporated into Acts without fully rewriting it into the third person, meaning the pronoun may reveal something about a source used rather than about the final author's own presence. This reading is often, though not always, paired with a later date for the finished book.

A third, narrower argument deserves mention chiefly for how it has fared. Vernon Robbins, a New Testament scholar at Emory University and the originator of socio-rhetorical criticism, once argued, drawing on Greco-Roman sea-voyage literature, that first-person plural narration was itself a known convention in that genre, meaning 'we' might be a genre marker rather than a claim of presence at all. That specific argument was examined closely afterward, notably by Susan Marie Praeder, and found not to hold up against the ancient texts Robbins had cited, so it now survives mainly as a footnote in the debate rather than a live contender.

What is settled: the shift is a genuine, repeated feature of the text, and no serious interpreter treats it as accidental or meaningless. What is not settled: whether it proves the final author's own eyewitness presence, reflects an incorporated source, or, on the weakest option above, reflects a literary habit unconnected to presence at all. How one reads the 'we' passages is entangled with, but not identical to, the larger and separate question of when Acts was written and by whom, a question the next lesson approaches from a different angle.