Acts 16:40

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, pp. 57, 58. ἐξῆλθον : the third person indicates that the narrator of the “We” section, Acts 16:9-10, remained at Philippi, Timothy probably accompanying Paul and Silas. In Acts 20:5 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 characteristic of St. Luke's record of our Lord's teaching, and so characteristic of the mind of St. Paul. Both from a religious and social point of view the conversions at Philippi are full of significance. 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, Galatians 3:28, and again in writing to the Colossians 3:11 : “Christ was all and in all”; in Him the soothsaying slave-girl, the proselyte 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 Jewish 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, 293. The view that the narrative is simply a fiction modelled upon the escape of St. Peter in Acts 4:31; Acts 4:12 is untenable in face of the many differences in the narratives (see the points of contrast in Nösgen, Apostel geschichte, pp. 315, 316). (Schneckenburger 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, c. 27, is still more absurd, cf. Zöckler, Apostelgeschichte, p. 262 (second edition), and Farrar, St. Paul, i., 501, whilst more recently Schmiedel (1898) attempts to find a parallel in Euripides, Bacchæ, 436 441, 502, 602 628, see Wendt's note, p. 282 (1899). Weizsäckcr 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 the 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 represents 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 guaranteed by the “We” source, and is full of legendary matter. Thus Acts 16:25-34 are dismissed as a later addition, and Ramsay's fresh and careful explanations are dismissed by Holtzmann as “humbug”! Theologische Literaturzeitung, No. 7, 1899.

Additional Note. Chap. Acts 16:12, “which is a city of Macedonia, the first of the district,” R.V. This might mean, so far as πρώτη is concerned, that Philippi was the city nearest in the district, and the city which they first reached. Neapolis, which actually came first on the route, was not generally regarded as Macedonian but Thracian; so Lightfoot, Rendall, O. Holtzmann. Or it might also mean that it was “the chief” (A.V.), the leading city of its division of Macedonia (Ramsay). Here again Ramsay sees a proof of St. Luke's intimate acquaintance with the rivalries of the Greek cities, and of his special interest in Philippi. In B.C. 167 the province Macedonia had been divided by the Romans into four districts, μερίς, and even if this division were obsolete at the time, another would be likely to succeed to it (so Ramsay, Church in the Roman Empire, p. 158, as against Lightfoot, Phil., p. 50, who takes πρώτη as denoting not the political but the geographical position of Philippi.) At this time Amphipolis was the chief (πρώτη) city of the district to which both it and Philippi belonged, but though Amphipolis held the rank, Philippi claimed the same title, a case of rivalry between two or even three cities which often occurred. This single passage Ramsay regards as conclusive of the claims of Philippi, see St. Paul, p. 207, and Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, ii., 429. As to whether μερίς can be used in the sense of a division of a province, cf. Ramsay, Church in the Roman Empire, p. 158, and the instances quoted from Egypt, and also Expositor, October, 1897, p. 320, as against Hort's limitation of the term. Hort, W.H [301], App. 96 (to whose view Rendall inclines, cf. also Zahn, Einleitung, i., p. 375), thinks that μερίδος must be a corruption, and proposes Πιερίδος, Pieria being an ancient name of that part of Macedonia; but he declines to draw any positive conclusion in its favour. Wendt, following Meyer, regards πρώτη as signifying rank, and so far he is in agreement with Ramsay. But as Amphipolis was really the chief town of the district, he contends that πόλις κολωνία might be taken as one phrase (see also Hackett, Overbeck, Weiss, Holtzmann), and so he regards the whole expression as signifying that Philippi is spoken of as the most considerable colony-town in that district of Macedonia, whilst he agrees with Hort and Lightfoot in maintaining that πρώτη is only classical as an absolute title of towns in Asia Minor. This Ramsay allows, but the title was frequent in Asia and Cilicia, and might easily have been used elsewhere, Church in the Roman Empire, p. 156; Holtzmann quite admits that the term may have been applied as in Asian towns to signify the enjoyment of certain privileges. For Ramsay's criticism of Codex [302], which substitutes κεφαλὴ τῆς Μ. and omits μερίδος altogether, see Church in the Roman Empire, pp. 156, 157, and Expositor, u. s., κεφαλή being evidently substituted because the term πρώτη is ambiguous, and so liable to be misunderstood. Blass himself finds fault with, and also considers πρώτη wrong, not only because Amphipolis was superior in rank, but because Thessalonica was called πρώτη Μακεδόνων, C. T. Gr [303], 1967. But this would not prevent the rivalry amongst other towns in the various subdivisions of the province. Blass reads in β πρώτης μερίδος (a reading which Lightfoot thinks might deserve some consideration, though unsupported, if the original Roman fourfold division of the provinces were still maintained, see above, p. 355), and takes it as referring to Philippi as a city of the first of the four regiones.

[301] Westcott and Hort's The New Testament in Greek: Critical Text and Notes.

[302] Codex Claromontanus (sæc. vi.), a Græco-Latin MS. at Paris, edited by Tischendorf in 1852.

[303] Greek, or Grotius' Annotationes in N.T.