Acts 18:5-17
Review:
Background:
Text:
5 When Silas and Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus. 6 And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” 7 And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. His house was next door to the synagogue. 8 Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized. 9 And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, 10 for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.” 11 And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.
12 But when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, 13 saying, “This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.” 14 But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Gallio said to the Jews, “If it were a matter of wrongdoing or vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint. 15 But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves. I refuse to be a judge of these things.” 16 And he drove them from the tribunal. 17 And they all seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and beat him in front of the tribunal. But Gallio paid no attention to any of this.
In Corinth, Paul was back to the normal procedure: debate in the synagogue, and then, if they rejected the message, turning to Gentiles. But here it was with a difference. In the Galatian cities on his first journey, and then in Philippi, Thessalonica and even Beroea, his visits were cut short by angry reaction, often initiated by ‘zealous’ Jews who resented both his message and its simultaneous claim to be both the fulfilment of the ancient scriptures and freely available to all without distinction, Jew and Gentile alike. But in Corinth he stayed longer than a few days, or even a few weeks. He stayed for a year and a half—the longest time he had been in any one place for quite some while, probably since the time back in Syrian Antioch in 11:26
main reason is the remarkable vision he had one night (verses 9–10). Whereas the last vision he had had was of someone telling him to go somewhere he hadn’t expected (16:9), this one was telling him to stay put. And the Lord, speaking to him personally and not through an angel or a figure like a ‘man from Macedon’, gave him an interesting reason: There are many of my people in this city. In other words, evangelism is only just beginning here. Settle down and get on with it. I am at work here, and you must trust me and stick it out.
The details of his accustomed torrid time in the synagogue are interesting for two things in particular. First, he makes a kind of formal protest against the synagogue, declaring as he does to the Ephesian elders in 20:26 that he is innocent of their blood—which sounds alarming, as indeed in a sense it is. Paul takes his office of apostleship extremely seriously. He really does believe that from place to place he is going round giving the Jewish communities their main chance to respond to the news about their own Messiah.
If they reject it, he will turn, as he usually does, to the Gentiles. But this leads to the second point of considerable interest: because the synagogue ruler, a man named Crispus, becomes a believer, as do many others. Paul himself baptizes Crispus, as we discover in 1 Corinthians 1:14. Perhaps this high-profile convert is part at least of the reason why there is less immediate, and less violent, trouble than there might otherwise have been.
Sosthenes Possibly the same Sosthenes mentioned in 1 Cor 1:1. If this is the case, he may have become a Christian after this incident.