Acts 8: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

After Stephen's death, persecution scatters the believers from Jerusalem, and Saul drags men and women off to prison, while those who scatter preach wherever they go. Philip preaches in a city in Samaria, where many believe and are baptized, including Simon, a sorcerer; Peter and John come, and Peter rebukes Simon for offering money to buy the power to give the Holy Spirit. An angel then sends Philip to a desert road, where he explains a passage of Isaiah to an Ethiopian official and baptizes him, after which the Spirit takes Philip away and he preaches from Azotus to Caesarea.

Claim by Claim

1. 8:1
   • Saul was consenting to Stephen's death.
   • At that time a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem.
   • All of them were scattered throughout the regions of Judaea and Samaria.
   • The apostles were not scattered.
2. 8:2
   • Devout men carried Stephen out and buried him.
   • They made great lamentation over him.
3. 8:3
   • Saul was ravaging the church.
   • Saul entered house after house.
   • Saul dragged out men and women.
   • Saul handed them over to prison.
4. 8:4
   • Those who had been scattered went about preaching the word.
5. 8:5
   • Philip went down to a city of Samaria.
   • It is unclear whether the text means the city of Samaria or a city in Samaria.
   • Philip proclaimed Christ to them.
6. 8:6
   • The crowds with one accord paid attention to what Philip said.
   • They heard him.
   • They saw the signs he performed.
7. 8:7
   • Unclean spirits came out of many who were possessed by them.
   • The unclean spirits cried out with a loud voice.
   • Many who were paralyzed were healed.
   • Many who were lame were healed.
8. 8:8
   • There was great joy in that city.
9. 8:9
   • There was a man named Simon.
   • Simon had previously practiced sorcery in that city.
   • Simon amazed the people of Samaria.
   • Simon claimed that he himself was someone great.
10. 8:10
    • All of them, from the least to the greatest, paid attention to him.
    • They said this man is the power of God that is called Great.
11. 8:11
    • They paid attention to him.
    • They did so because he had amazed them for a long time with his sorceries.
12. 8:12
    • They believed Philip as he preached the things concerning the kingdom of God.
    • He preached the name of Jesus Christ.
    • They were baptized.
    • Both men and women were baptized.
13. 8:13
    • Simon himself also believed.
    • Simon was baptized.
    • Simon stayed close to Philip.
    • Simon was amazed as he watched the miracles and signs that were done.
14. 8:14
    • The apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had received the word of God.
    • The apostles sent Peter and John to them.
15. 8:15
    • Peter and John came down.
    • They prayed for the Samaritans that they might receive the Holy Spirit.
16. 8:16
    • The Holy Spirit had not yet fallen on any of them.
    • They had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus.
17. 8:17
    • Peter and John laid their hands on them.
    • They received the Holy Spirit.
18. 8:18
    • Simon saw that the Holy Spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands.
    • Simon offered the apostles money.
19. 8:19
    • Simon said, Give me this authority also.
    • Simon said, so that whoever I lay my hands on may receive the Holy Spirit.
20. 8:20
    • Peter said to him, May your money perish with you.
    • Peter said the reason was that Simon thought the gift of God could be obtained with money.
21. 8:21
    • Peter said Simon has neither part nor share in this matter.
    • Peter said Simon's heart is not right before God.
22. 8:22
    • Peter told Simon to repent of this wickedness of his.
    • Peter told Simon to pray to God.
    • Peter said the thought of Simon's heart might perhaps be forgiven him.
    • Peter's statement leaves the forgiveness uncertain.
23. 8:23
    • Peter said, I see that you are in the gall of bitterness.
    • Peter said Simon is in the bond of iniquity.
24. 8:24
    • Simon answered and said, Pray to the Lord for me.
    • Simon said, so that none of the things you have spoken may come upon me.
25. 8:25
    • Peter and John testified and spoke the word of the Lord.
    • They returned to Jerusalem.
    • They preached the gospel in many villages of the Samaritans.
26. 8:26
    • An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip.
    • The angel told Philip to get up and go.
    • The angel told Philip to go toward the south, or at noon; the word carries both senses.
    • The angel directed him to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.
    • The text says it is desert, without making clear whether the road or Gaza is meant.
27. 8:27
    • Philip got up and went.
    • There was a man of Ethiopia.
    • The man was a eunuch.
    • The man was a court official under Candace, queen of the Ethiopians.
    • The man was in charge of all her treasure.
    • The man had come to Jerusalem to worship.
28. 8:28
    • The man was returning.
    • The man was sitting in his chariot.
    • The man was reading the prophet Isaiah.
29. 8:29
    • The Spirit said to Philip, Go near and join yourself to this chariot.
30. 8:30
    • Philip ran to him.
    • Philip heard him reading the prophet Isaiah.
    • Philip said, Do you understand what you are reading?
31. 8:31
    • The man said, How can I, unless someone guides me?
    • The man asked Philip to come up and sit with him.
32. 8:32
    • The passage of scripture he was reading was as follows.
    • The passage says he was led as a sheep to the slaughter.
    • The passage says he was like a lamb silent before its shearer.
    • The passage says he did not open his mouth.
33. 8:33
    • The passage says in his humiliation his justice was taken away.
    • The passage asks who will declare his generation.
    • The passage says his life is taken from the earth.
34. 8:34
    • The eunuch answered Philip.
    • The eunuch asked of whom the prophet says this.
    • The eunuch asked whether the prophet speaks of himself or of someone else.
35. 8:35
    • Philip opened his mouth.
    • Philip began from that same scripture.
    • Philip preached Jesus to him.
36. 8:36
    • As they went along the road they came to some water.
    • The eunuch said, See, here is water.
    • The eunuch asked what hinders him from being baptized.
37. 8:37
    • Philip said, If you believe with all your heart, you may.
    • The eunuch answered and said, I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.
38. 8:38
    • He ordered the chariot to stop.
    • Both of them went down into the water.
    • The two were Philip and the eunuch.
    • Philip baptized him.
39. 8:39
    • They came up out of the water.
    • The Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away.
    • The eunuch did not see him again.
    • The eunuch went on his way rejoicing.
40. 8:40
    • Philip was found at Azotus.
    • Philip passed through and preached the gospel in all the cities.
    • Philip continued until he came to Caesarea.

Words Worth Explaining

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

8:1

"The church" translates a Greek word meaning a called-out assembly, that is, the community of believers itself. There were no church buildings yet; they met in houses and in the temple courts. Saul is the same man called Paul from Acts 13 onward. The apostles were the inner group Jesus had commissioned as his authorized messengers; the word means "ones sent out." Judea is the region around Jerusalem, Samaria the region immediately north of it.

8:2

"Devout" translates a word for men careful in their religious duty. Loud wailing was the expected public form of mourning, performed openly and often with hired mourners, not kept private. Burying a man a mob had just killed for blasphemy also carried risk, since it publicly identified the mourners with him.

8:3

Two King James words have shifted since 1611. "Havock" is an older spelling of havoc, which then meant the wholesale wrecking and plundering of a captured place. "Haling" means hauling or dragging by force; it has nothing to do with hailing someone.

8:5

Samaria was the name of a region and, historically, of its old capital city. The Samaritans were descendants of the northern Israelites who worshiped at Mount Gerizim rather than Jerusalem and accepted only the five books of Moses as Scripture; Jews and Samaritans regarded each other as outsiders and dealings between them were strained. Manuscripts differ over whether Luke wrote "the city" or "a city" of Samaria. "Christ" is not a surname but a title, Greek for "anointed one," the word that translates the Hebrew "Messiah."

8:6

"Gave heed" simply means paid attention. The word the King James renders "miracles" is literally "signs": acts understood to point beyond themselves to the one who sent the person doing them.

8:7

"Palsy" was the ordinary English word in 1611 for paralysis, from the same root, covering a range of conditions in which the body will not move properly. "Unclean" is a ritual term, not a comment on dirt: it marks something as unfit to come near what is holy.

8:9

"Bewitched" in 1611 English means amazed or astounded, and that is what the Greek says: he put people out of their senses with astonishment. It does not mean he cast spells on them. "Used sorcery" means practiced magic as a trade, which in the Roman world was a recognized and often lucrative profession.

8:10

The words read like a title. In Samaritan religious language "the Great Power" was a way of naming God's own active power, so the crowd is not merely praising Simon's skill; it is saying that this power is present in him.

8:12

Baptism was a washing in water that marked a person's entry into a community. Ritual washings were already familiar in Jewish practice, and a full bath was used when a Gentile converted, so the act itself needed no explaining to Luke's first readers.

8:14

An apostle is someone sent out with the authority to act for the person who sent him. Here the word means the group Jesus had chosen and commissioned, who were still based in Jerusalem.

8:15

In 1611 "Ghost" simply meant "spirit." "Holy Ghost" and "Holy Spirit" translate the same two Greek words, and nothing about a haunting is implied.

8:16

"Baptized in the name of" is an idiom of transfer. A name in this construction marks whose possession or allegiance a person now enters, much as money could be paid "into the name of" someone's account.

8:17

Placing hands on a person was a recognized formal gesture in Jewish practice, used to bless, to commission someone to an office, and to mark the passing of something from one party to another. It was a public, deliberate act, not an affectionate touch.

8:18

The English word "simony," meaning the buying or selling of a religious office or privilege, is taken from this Simon and this offer.

8:20

Peter's words are literally "your silver be with you into destruction." "Silver" is the ordinary Greek word for coined money. The sentence has the form of a curse or oath rather than a prediction of what will in fact happen.

8:21

"Part nor lot" is a legal idiom for a share in property. A "lot" was originally a portion assigned by casting lots, the method by which land was divided in Israel, so the phrase means he holds no stake in this whatever.

8:22

"If perhaps" preserves a genuine tentativeness in the Greek, which leaves the outcome open rather than promising it. "Heart" here means the mind and the will, the place where intentions are formed, not the seat of feeling.

8:23

Both phrases are Old Testament idioms. "Gall" is a bitter and poisonous plant substance; Deuteronomy 29:18 speaks of a "root that beareth gall and wormwood," meaning a person whose loyalty has gone rotten. "Bond of iniquity" pictures wrongdoing as a chain or fetter. The Greek preposition is "into," so the phrase can be read either as the state he is in or as the state he is heading toward.

8:26

"Toward the south" translates a Greek word that can mean either "south" or "midday," so the instruction is either a direction or a time of day, and translators divide over which. "Which is desert" is equally ambiguous: the clause may describe the road or the town. Gaza was the southernmost of the old Philistine cities, on the coastal route toward Egypt, and marked the point where the road entered dry, thinly settled country.

8:27

"Ethiopia" here is not the modern country. It refers to the kingdom of Kush or Nubia on the Nile south of Egypt, in what is now Sudan; to Greeks and Romans it stood for the far southern edge of the known world. "Candace" is a title rather than a personal name, borne by the queen mother who ruled in that kingdom. "Eunuch" means a castrated man, and such men were routinely employed as trusted officials in royal courts; because of that the word also hardened into a court title for a high official, so the term alone does not settle the man's physical condition. It bears on the story that under Deuteronomy 23:1 a castrated man was barred from the assembly of the Lord, so a worshiper in that state could go to Jerusalem but not enter fully.

8:28

"Esaias" is the Greek form of the name Isaiah. He is reading from a scroll, an expensive object that in itself indicates wealth and position.

8:30

Reading aloud was the normal practice in the ancient world, even when a person read alone. That is why Philip, running alongside the moving chariot, could hear what the man had in front of him.

8:32

The passage is Isaiah 53, quoted in its Greek version, which differs from the Hebrew in places. "Dumb" in the King James means unable to speak or making no sound; it carries no suggestion of stupidity. Shearing removes the wool and does not kill the animal, so the two pictures in the verse are not identical.

8:33

This verse is obscure in the Greek and follows the Septuagint, which diverges here from the Hebrew of Isaiah. "Judgment" means justice, or a fair hearing, rather than a verdict against him: the sense is that he was denied due process. "Who shall declare his generation" is genuinely ambiguous. "Generation" can mean his descendants, his family line, the people alive in his own time, or the span of his life, and the line can be read as a question about who could recount them or as an exclamation that no one can.

8:35

"Opened his mouth" is a set idiom in Hebrew and Greek for beginning a formal or weighty speech. It does not describe a physical action.

8:36

Water is scarce along that route, which is what makes the sight of it worth exclaiming over. The wording of the question, "what doth hinder me," may echo a fixed question put to candidates at baptism in the early churches.

8:37

This verse is absent from the earliest and best manuscripts of Acts, and most modern translations go straight from verse 36 to verse 38. It appears to be an early addition that preserves the question and answer used when candidates were baptized. The King James follows later manuscripts that include it.

8:38

The wording describes both men stepping down into the water. It does not by itself specify how much of the body was covered.

8:39

"Caught away" translates a forceful Greek verb meaning snatched or seized, used elsewhere of someone being carried off suddenly and against expectation. Some manuscripts have a longer reading here: that the Holy Spirit fell on the eunuch, and an angel of the Lord then snatched Philip away.

8:40

Azotus is the Greek name for Ashdod, one of the five old Philistine cities on the coastal plain. Caesarea, roughly sixty miles further north, was the harbor city built by Herod the Great and served as the seat of the Roman governor of Judea. Philip is still living there many years later, in Acts 21.

Where the Manuscripts Differ

Worth knowing before you stand up: a listener following a modern translation may not have this verse in front of them.

8:37

Most modern translations leave this verse out. It is in the Greek text the King James translators worked from, but not in the older manuscripts found since, so scholars generally take it as a copyist’s addition rather than part of the original.