Acts 18: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Paul leaves Athens for Corinth, where he works as a tentmaker with Aquila and Priscilla and argues in the synagogue each Sabbath. After being opposed there, he turns to non-Jews, and a vision from the Lord keeps him teaching in the city for a year and a half. The Jews rise up together and bring him before the Roman governor Gallio, who refuses to hear a case he judges to be about their own law. Paul then sails to Syria by way of Ephesus and returns through Galatia and Phrygia, while at Ephesus a learned Jew named Apollos is taught more fully by Priscilla and Aquila and goes on to Achaia.

Claim by Claim

1. 18:1
   • After these things Paul departed from Athens.
   • Paul came to Corinth.
2. 18:2
   • Paul found a certain Jew named Aquila.
   • Aquila was born in Pontus.
   • Aquila had recently come from Italy.
   • Aquila's wife was named Priscilla.
   • Priscilla had come with Aquila.
   • Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome.
   • Paul came to Aquila and Priscilla.
3. 18:3
   • Paul was of the same trade as Aquila and Priscilla.
   • Because of the shared trade, Paul stayed with them.
   • Paul worked with them.
   • Their occupation was tentmaking.
4. 18:4
   • Paul reasoned in the synagogue every sabbath.
   • Paul persuaded Jews.
   • Paul persuaded Greeks.
5. 18:5
   • Silas came down from Macedonia.
   • Timothy came down from Macedonia.
   • When they arrived, Paul was pressed in the spirit.
   • Paul testified to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ.
6. 18:6
   • The Jews opposed Paul.
   • The Jews blasphemed.
   • Paul shook out his garments.
   • Paul said to them that their blood be upon their own heads.
   • Paul said he was clean.
   • Paul said that from then on he would go to the Gentiles.
7. 18:7
   • Paul departed from that place.
   • Paul entered the house of a certain man named Justus.
   • Justus was a worshipper of God.
   • Justus's house adjoined the synagogue.
8. 18:8
   • Crispus was the ruler of the synagogue.
   • Crispus believed on the Lord.
   • Crispus's whole household believed with him.
   • Many of the Corinthians heard and believed.
   • Those Corinthians were baptized.
9. 18:9
   • The Lord spoke to Paul in the night by a vision.
   • The Lord told Paul not to be afraid.
   • The Lord told Paul to speak.
   • The Lord told Paul not to keep silent.
10. 18:10
    • The Lord said he was with Paul.
    • The Lord said no one would attack Paul to hurt him.
    • The Lord said he had many people in that city.
11. 18:11
    • Paul stayed there a year and six months.
    • Paul taught the word of God among them.
12. 18:12
    • Gallio was deputy of Achaia at that time.
    • The Jews with one accord rose up against Paul.
    • The Jews brought Paul to the judgment seat.
13. 18:13
    • The Jews said that this man persuaded men to worship God contrary to the law.
14. 18:14
    • Paul was about to open his mouth.
    • Gallio spoke to the Jews.
    • Gallio said that if it were a matter of wrong or wicked crime, it would be reasonable for him to bear with them.
15. 18:15
    • Gallio said that if it was a question of words and names and their own law, they should see to it themselves.
    • Gallio said he would not be a judge of such matters.
16. 18:16
    • Gallio drove them away from the judgment seat.
17. 18:17
    • All the Greeks seized Sosthenes.
    • Sosthenes was the ruler of the synagogue.
    • They beat Sosthenes before the judgment seat.
    • Gallio cared for none of those things.
18. 18:18
    • Paul stayed on there a good while longer.
    • Paul took his leave of the brethren.
    • Paul sailed from there to Syria.
    • Priscilla and Aquila went with him.
    • A head was shorn in Cenchrea, and the text leaves it open whether the one shorn was Paul or Aquila.
    • The one who was shorn had a vow.
19. 18:19
    • Paul came to Ephesus.
    • Paul left Priscilla and Aquila there.
    • Paul himself entered the synagogue.
    • Paul reasoned with the Jews.
20. 18:20
    • They asked Paul to stay a longer time.
    • Paul did not consent.
21. 18:21
    • Paul bade them farewell.
    • Paul said he must by all means keep the coming feast in Jerusalem.
    • Paul said he would return to them again.
    • Paul made his return conditional on God's will.
    • Paul sailed from Ephesus.
22. 18:22
    • Paul landed at Caesarea.
    • Paul went up.
    • Paul greeted the church.
    • Paul went down to Antioch.
23. 18:23
    • Paul spent some time there.
    • Paul departed.
    • Paul passed through the region of Galatia and Phrygia in order.
    • Paul strengthened all the disciples.
24. 18:24
    • A certain Jew was named Apollos.
    • Apollos was born at Alexandria.
    • Apollos was an eloquent man.
    • Apollos was mighty in the scriptures.
    • Apollos came to Ephesus.
25. 18:25
    • Apollos had been instructed in the way of the Lord.
    • Apollos was fervent in the spirit.
    • Apollos spoke and taught diligently the things of the Lord.
    • Apollos knew only the baptism of John.
26. 18:26
    • Apollos began to speak boldly in the synagogue.
    • Aquila and Priscilla heard him.
    • They took him to themselves.
    • They expounded to him the way of God more accurately.
27. 18:27
    • Apollos was disposed to cross into Achaia.
    • The brethren wrote a letter.
    • The letter exhorted the disciples to receive Apollos.
    • Apollos arrived.
    • Apollos helped much those who had believed through grace.
28. 18:28
    • Apollos mightily refuted the Jews.
    • He did so publicly.
    • He showed by the scriptures that Jesus was the Christ.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

18:1

Corinth was a Roman colony and the administrative center of the province of Achaia, about fifty miles west of Athens. It sat on the narrow neck of land between two seas and controlled the traffic of both, which made it rich, crowded and constantly full of strangers. Its name had become a byword in Greek for loose living.

18:2

Pontus was a region along the southern shore of the Black Sea, in what is now northern Turkey. Claudius was Roman emperor from AD 41 to 54; the Roman writer Suetonius records that he expelled the Jews from Rome over disturbances stirred up by someone he calls "Chrestus," a name often taken to be a garbled reference to Christ. The expulsion is usually dated around AD 49.

18:3

"Wrought" simply means worked. The Greek word behind "tentmakers" covers working in leather or in the coarse woven cloth of goat hair used for tents, awnings and sails. Jewish teachers were commonly expected to support themselves by a trade rather than charge for their teaching.

18:4

"Reasoned" translates a Greek word meaning to discuss and argue back and forth, not to deliver a speech. The "Greeks" here are non Jews who attended the synagogue because they were drawn to the God of Israel, without becoming full converts.

18:5

"Timotheus" is the Greek form of Timothy. "Pressed in the spirit" reflects a reading found in some manuscripts; others read that Paul was gripped or wholly taken up "by the word," that is, by the preaching itself. "Christ" is not a surname but the Greek for Messiah, "the anointed one," the king God had promised to send to Israel; to say "Jesus is the Christ" was to make a claim, not to state a name.

18:6

Shaking out one's clothes was a recognized gesture of breaking off all responsibility for what followed, like shaking dust from the feet. "Your blood be upon your own heads" is an Old Testament legal idiom: if a watchman gives the warning and is ignored, the deaths are not charged to him. "Blasphemed" here means spoke abusively, of Paul as much as of God. "Gentiles" means everyone who is not Jewish.

18:7

"One that worshipped God" is close to a technical term. Such people, often called God fearers, were non Jews who attended synagogue, accepted the God of Israel and kept some of the law, but had not become Jews. They were the readiest hearers Paul had. "Joined hard to" means shared a wall with; Paul moved next door, not out of reach.

18:8

"Chief ruler of the synagogue" renders one Greek word for the official who managed the building, the services and the reading of Scripture. It was a position of standing in the community, which is why his believing is reported by name. "All his house" means the entire household: family, servants, slaves and dependents, who in that world normally followed the head of the house in matters of religion.

18:9

"Hold not thy peace" is older English for do not fall silent.

18:10

"Much people" is 1611 English for many people; "much" could be used of number as well as quantity. The Greek word for "people" is the one regularly used in the Greek Old Testament for Israel as God's own people.

18:12

"Deputy" is the KJV's word for a proconsul, the governor of a province administered by the Roman Senate. Gallio was the brother of the philosopher Seneca; an inscription found at Delphi fixes his time in office at roughly AD 51 to 52, which makes this the firmest date anywhere in Paul's travels. "Made insurrection" does not mean a revolt against Rome; it means they moved against Paul together, as one body. The "judgment seat" was the bema, a raised stone platform in the public square from which a governor heard cases; the one at Corinth has been excavated.

18:13

"The law" is left unspecified in the Greek and the ambiguity may be deliberate. It could mean the Jewish law, in which case the quarrel is internal, or Roman law, in which case the charge is that Paul is promoting a religion outside the legal protection Judaism enjoyed. Gallio's answer treats it as the first.

18:14

"Lewdness" in 1611 meant wickedness or villainy in general, with no particular sexual sense; the Greek word suggests fraud or a piece of unscrupulous mischief. "Reason would that I should bear with you" means it would be reasonable for me to hear you out.

18:15

"Look ye to it" means see to it yourselves. A Roman governor had wide discretion to refuse cases he judged to fall outside Roman law.

18:16

"Drave" is the old past tense of drove.

18:17

Manuscripts differ over "all the Greeks": some read simply "they all," leaving it unclear who did the beating. A Sosthenes appears again as a companion of Paul at the opening of First Corinthians, though the name was common. "Cared for none of those things" can mean Gallio was indifferent to the violence or that he regarded none of it as his business; the Greek does not settle which.

18:18

"Tarried" means stayed and "the brethren" means fellow believers, men and women together. Cenchrea was Corinth's harbor on the eastern side of the isthmus. Shaving the head marked the end of a vow of the kind described in Numbers 6, in which a person set apart a period of time to God, left the hair uncut for its duration, then cut it off and brought offerings. In the Greek the phrase "having shorn his head" stands next to Aquila's name, so it is not certain whether Paul or Aquila made the vow, though most take it to be Paul.

18:19

Ephesus was the leading city of the Roman province of Asia, on the western coast of what is now Turkey, a major port and the site of the temple of Artemis. Paul will later spend some years there.

18:21

The words about keeping the coming feast in Jerusalem are missing from the earliest manuscripts and appear only in later ones, which the King James translators were following. The feast would have been one of the pilgrimage festivals, most likely Passover or Pentecost.

18:22

One always "goes up" to Jerusalem and "down" from it in this idiom, whatever the compass direction, because the city stands high in the hill country. Jerusalem is not named here, but "went up" and then "went down to Antioch" implies it. Caesarea was the Roman administrative port on the coast of Judea; Antioch in Syria was the church that had first sent Paul out.

18:23

Galatia and Phrygia were inland regions of Asia Minor, in modern Turkey, containing towns Paul had evangelized earlier. "In order" means one place after another, in sequence along the route.

18:24

Alexandria in Egypt held the largest Jewish community outside Judea and was a center of learning where the Scriptures were studied and interpreted in Greek. The Greek word rendered "eloquent" can mean a skilled speaker or a learned man, and either sense fits. "Mighty in the scriptures" means powerfully versed in the Jewish Scriptures, what Christians later called the Old Testament, which were the only Scriptures then in existence.

18:25

"Instructed" translates a word for formal oral teaching, being taken through the material step by step. "Fervent in the spirit" renders a phrase that literally means boiling; the Greek leaves open whether this is his own eagerness or the Holy Spirit at work in him. "Diligently" here means accurately rather than merely hard working. The "baptism of John" was John the Baptist's washing in the Jordan as a sign of repentance and of readiness for the one who was coming, which was not the same thing as the baptism practiced in Jesus' name.

18:26

"More perfectly" means more accurately or more fully; in 1611 "perfectly" carried the sense of completely, not flawlessly. Priscilla is named before her husband here and in several other places, which was unusual enough in Greek writing to be worth noticing.

18:27

"Disposed" means decided or minded to go. Letters of introduction were the ordinary machinery of travel in the ancient world, vouching for a stranger to a community that had no other way to check him. In the Greek, "through grace" can attach either to the helping or to the believing, so the sentence may mean that he helped them greatly by God's kindness, or that he helped those who had come to believe by God's kindness.

18:28

"Convinced" in 1611 meant refuted, to prove someone wrong in argument, not to win them over. "Publickly" is the old spelling; the point is that this happened in open debate rather than in private. "The scriptures" are again the Jewish Scriptures, the common ground both sides accepted.