Ver. 39. See addition in D, critical note. The fear of a further riot expressed by the magistrates is exactly what we should expect in the cities of the AZgean lands, which were always weak in their municipal government. D also expresses the naive way in which the magistrates not only try to throw the blame upon the people, but wanted to get out of a diffi- culty by procuring the withdrawal from the city of the injured parties, Ramsay, u. S.,p. 224. The Greek pointedly and dramatically expresses the change in the whole situation: €\@évres—mapexddeoav ---ἐξαγαγόντες ἠρώτων ! (Wendt).
Ver. 40. εἰς, see critical notes; they would not leave the city without once more visiting the household out of which grew the Church dearest to St. Paul; see Lightfoot’s remarks on the growth of the Church from “ the Church in the house,” Philippians, ΡΡ. 57, 58.--ἐξῆλθον: the third person indicates that the narrator of the
38-49,
ἐξελθεῖν τῆς πόλεως.
355
40. ἐξελθόντες δὲ ἐκ τῆς φΦυλακῆς εἰσῆλθον
εἰς τὴν Λυδίαν: καὶ ἰδόντες τοὺς ἀδελφούς,ὶ παρεκάλεσαν αὐτούς,
καὶ ἐξῆλθον.
1 After αδελφους D adds διηγησαντο οσα εποιησεν Κνριος αντοις, 50 Blass in β,
and Hilg.
‘© We” section, xvi. 9, 10, remained at Philippi, Timothy probably accompanying Paul and Silas. In xx. 5 we again have ἡμᾶς introduced, and the inference is that St. Luke remained at Philippi during the interval, or at least for a part of it; and it is reasonable to infer that he laboured there in the Gospel, although he modestly refrains (as elsewhere) from any notice of his own work. The Apostle’s first visit to Philippi represented in epitome the universality of the Gospel, so char- acteristic of St. Luke’s record of our Lord’s teaching, and so characteristic of the mind of St. Paul. Both from a teligious and social point of view the conversions at Philippi are full of sig- nificance. The Jew could express his thankfulness in his morning prayer that God had not made him a Gentile—a woman—a slave. But at Philippi St. Paul taught in action the principle which he enforced in his Galatian Epistle, iii. 28, and again in writing to the Colossians, iii. 11: ‘* Christ was all and in all’’; in Him the soothsaying slave-girl, the pro- selyte of Thyatira, the Roman jailor, were each and all the children of God, and fellow-citizens with the saints, Lightfoot, Introduction to Philippians; Taylor, Sayings of the Fewish Fathers, pp. 15, 26, 137 (second edition).
The narrative of St. Paul’s visit to Philippi has been made the object of attack from various quarters. Most of the objections have been stated and met by Professor Ramsay, and a summary of them with their refutation is aptly given in a recent article by Dr. Giesekke (Studien und Kritiken, 1898) described at length in the Expository Times, March, 1898, see also Knabenbauer, pp. 292, 203. The view that the narrative is simply a fic- tion modelled upon the escape of St. Peter in iv. 31 and xii. is untenable in face of the many differences in the narratives (see the points of contrast in Nésgen, Afostel- geschichte, pp. 315, 316). (Schnecken- burger in his list of parallels between Peter and Paul in Acts apparently makes no mention of the supposed parallel here.) Zeller’s attempt to connect the narrative with the story in Lucian’s Toxaris, ο. 27, is still more absurd, cf. Zockler, Apos-
telgeschichte, p. 262 (second edition), and Farrar, St. Paul, i., 501, whilst more recently Schmiedel (1898) attempts to find a parallel in Euripides, Baccha, 436- 441, 502, 602-628, see Wendt’s note, p. 282 (1899). Weizsacker boldly refuses to admit even the imprisonment as a fact, and regards only the meeting of Paul with the soothsayer as historical. But it should be noted that he allows the Apostle’s intercourse with Lydia and his instruction of the women to be genuine historical incidents, and he makes jthe important remark that the name of Lydia is the more credible, since the Philippian Epistle seems to support the idea that women received Paul and contributed to the planting of the Church (Apostolic Age, i., 284, E.T.). Holtzmann repre- sents in a general manner the standpoint of modern advanced criticism, when he divides the narrative of the events at Philippi into two parts, the one concerned with events transacted under the open heaven, belonging not only to the ‘‘ We” source but bearing also the stamp of reality, whilst the other part is not guar- anteed by the ‘‘ We” source, and is full of legendary matter. Thus vv. 25-34 are dismissed as a later addition, and Ramsay’s fresh and careful explanations are dismissed by Holtzmann as “ hum- bug”! Theologische Literaturszeitung, No. 7, 1899.