Tent-Makers, and the Silversmiths

Paul left Athens and went on down the coast to Corinth — a loud, rich, rough port city with ships in two harbors and people from everywhere in its streets. At Corinth he found a Jew named Aquila and his wife Priscilla, just come from Italy because the emperor had ordered the Jews out of Rome. They made tents for a living, and so did Paul, so he moved in and worked beside them, and reasoned in the meeting house every Sabbath. When Silas and Timothy came down, the word took hold of him altogether. But the people set themselves against him, and he shook his clothes out at them. “Your blood is on your own heads,” he said. “I am clean. From now on I go to the nations.” Crispus, the ruler of the meeting house, trusted the Lord with his whole household, and a great many Corinthians heard and were immersed.

One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision. “Do not be afraid. Speak, and do not keep quiet, because I am with you, and nobody is going to lay a hand on you to hurt you. I have many people in this city.” So he stayed a year and six months. Then he sailed for Syria, leaving Priscilla and Aquila at Ephesus, and came back through Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening every disciple.

In that year and a half at Corinth, they once hauled him in front of the Roman governor, a man named Gallio, saying he was talking people into worshiping God in a way that was against the law. Paul opened his mouth to answer — and Gallio did not even let him start. He said, “If this were some crime or some piece of villainy, I would have every reason to listen to you. But if it is arguments about words and names and a law of your own, sort it out yourselves. I am not going to be a judge of things like that.” And he cleared them out of his court. Rome had just decided, without meaning to, that this was not its business — and for a while that ruling kept a great many people safe.

Then Paul came to Ephesus himself, and stayed. Three months in the meeting house, speaking boldly; and when some began saying evil things about the Way, he took the disciples out and talked every day instead in a hall belonging to a man named Tyrannus. He did that for two years, until everybody in Asia, Jew and Greek, had heard the word of the Lord.

Two other things happened at Ephesus. A man named Apollos had come through — a Jew from Alexandria, a fine speaker who knew the writings inside out and taught about Jesus accurately, as far as he had been taught, which was only as far as John at the river. And Priscilla and Aquila heard him in the meeting house and did not correct him in public. They took him home and explained the rest of the way to him over dinner. And he went on to Achaia and was a great help to everybody there. And Paul found about a dozen followers there who had never so much as heard that there was a Holy Spirit. He asked them what they had been immersed into, and they said, John’s immersion. So he told them who John had been pointing at; and they were immersed into the name of the Lord Jesus, and the Holy Spirit came on them. And God did such things through Paul’s hands in that city that people carried away cloths he had handled and took them to the sick, and the sick got better. Which gave some traveling men who made their living driving out spirits an idea. Seven of them tried it — “I put you on oath by the Jesus that Paul preaches” — and the spirit answered them: “Jesus I know. And Paul I know about. But you — who are you?” And the man they were standing over went for them, and they ran out of that house with their clothes torn. And the whole city heard about it, and stopped laughing.

Ephesus was a city of magic, full of charms and secret words. A fear came over it, and many who had come to trust said out loud what they had been doing. Then they brought their books of spells into the street, piled them up and burned them in front of everybody. Somebody added up what the books had cost: fifty thousand pieces of silver, going up in smoke.

What finally set the city off was money. Ephesus had the temple of the goddess Artemis, and a silversmith named Demetrius made little silver models of it to sell to visitors. A great many craftsmen lived off that trade. He called them together. “Men, you know our good living comes out of this business,” he said. “And you see and hear what this Paul has done — in nearly all Asia, not only here, he has talked a great crowd round, telling them that gods made by hands are not gods at all. Our trade will fall into disrepute — and worse, the temple of the great Artemis, whom all Asia worships, will be counted as nothing.”

They came out of that meeting in a rage, shouting. “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” The whole city went up. They rushed into the great theater together, dragging along two of Paul’s companions, Gaius and Aristarchus. Paul wanted to go in and speak; the disciples would not let him, and some important men of the province, his friends, begged him to keep out of that theater. Inside, some shouted one thing and some another, and most had no idea why they had come. Then one single voice came out of all of them, and went on for two hours. “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians! Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” The town clerk got them quiet in the end. These men had robbed no temple and blasphemed nobody, he told them; if Demetrius and his craftsmen had a case, the courts sat on fixed days. As it was, the city could be charged with rioting. And he sent them home.

When the uproar had died down Paul said goodbye and went through Macedonia into Greece for three months. A plot was laid against him as he was about to sail for Syria, so he went back by land, and sailed from Philippi to meet the others at Troas.

On the first day of the week they gathered upstairs to break bread. Paul was leaving in the morning, so he talked. And talked. Many lamps burned in that upper room, the air grew heavy, and it went past midnight. A young man named Eutychus was sitting in the window. He fought the sleep, and the sleep won, and he went out backwards and fell three floors. They picked him up dead. Paul came down the stairs, threw himself on the boy and took him up in his arms. “Do not make an uproar,” he said. “His life is in him.” Then he went back up, broke the bread, ate, and talked with them until it was light, and then left. And they took the boy home alive, comforted beyond measure.

The ship worked down the coast — Assos, where Paul came aboard after walking there alone, then island after island, then Miletus. He had decided to sail past Ephesus rather than be held up in Asia, hurrying to be in Jerusalem by Pentecost. But from Miletus he sent word up the road to Ephesus and asked the elders of the gathering to come down to him. And when they came, he said this to them.

“You know how I lived among you the whole time, from the first day I set foot in Asia — serving the Lord humbly, and with tears, and through everything that was plotted against me. I never held back anything that would have been of use to you. I told you and taught you, in public and in your houses, Jews and Greeks alike: change your minds and turn to God, and trust our Lord Jesus. And now, look. I am going to Jerusalem, tied to it in my spirit, and I do not know what will happen to me there. Only this: the Holy Spirit tells me, city after city, that chains and hard things are waiting for me. But I do not count my life worth anything to myself, so long as I finish my race and the work the Lord Jesus handed me: to tell people the good news of God’s favor.

“And now, look. I know that not one of you I went about proclaiming the kingdom to will see my face again. So I say today: I am clean of the blood of all of you, because I never held back from telling you the whole plan of God. Watch out for yourselves, and for all the flock the Holy Spirit has made you overseers of. Shepherd the gathering of God, which he bought with his own blood. After I am gone fierce wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock, and out of your own selves men will stand up and say twisted things, to drag the disciples off after them. So stay awake, and remember that for three years, night and day, I never stopped warning you with tears.

“And now I hand you over to God, and to the word of his favor, which can build you up and give you what belongs to all those who have been made holy. I never wanted anybody’s silver or gold or clothes. You know these hands. They paid for what I needed and for the men with me. In everything I showed you that this is how we have to work — hard, so that we can help the weak — and remember the words of the Lord Jesus, who said himself: ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’”

And when he had said that, he knelt down on the shore with them all and prayed. And they all cried. Every one of them. They put their arms round Paul’s neck and kissed him, and what hurt most was the thing he had said about never seeing his face again. And then they walked him down to the ship.