Acts 18:2

Acts 18:2. And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla. It seems, on the whole, probable that Aquila and Priscilla two great names in early Christian story were Christians before they met with Paul. There is no mention in the ‘Acts' of their conversion; and, as it has been well argued, Paul's ‘finding these Jews out and consorting with them, affords a strong presumption in favour of their Christianity: only among Christians could the apostle feel himself at home.' The friendship between Paul and the two tentmakers, Aquila, and Priscilla his wife, appears to have been very intimate and enduring. We read of them several times in his epistles. They were with him during his long residence at Ephesus; they were at Rome when he wrote the great letter to the Christians of that city; once (Romans 16:3-4), he tells us, these devoted friends laid down their necks for his (Paul's) life. If, as we suppose (see note on the next sentence), these two Jews had embraced the faith of Jesus before the meeting with Paul, then Aquila and Priscilla are the two most ancient-known members of the primitive Church of Rome.

Because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Borne. Suetonius (Claudius, 25) has a statement which exactly fits in with these words of the writer of the ‘Acts.' He (the Emperor Claudius) banished the Jews from Rome, who were constantly making disturbances at the instigation of one ‘Chrestus.' Christus was not unfrequently written or pronounced ‘Chrestus' (see Tertullian, Apol.). It is more than probable, considering the constant communication that was taking place between Rome and Antioch and Cæsarea, that Christianity had been introduced into Rome by travelling Syriac Jews long before this (A.D. 51). At that first Pentecost, for instance, nearly twenty years before, we know strangers of Rome' listened at Jerusalem to the inspired utterances of Peter and the eleven (Acts 2:10). We know that a large Jewish colony dwelt in the capital city; the causes, therefore, of the disturbance which occasioned the decree of the Emperor Claudius, are easily conceived. Jealousy on the part of the leaders of the Jewish community, was soon excited against the teachers of the new doctrines of Jesus; and what we have seen taking place at Antioch in Pisidia, at Lystra, at Philippi, at Thessalonica, no doubt on a larger scale took place in the crowded Jews' quarter on the banks of the Tiber at Rome; and the result of the uproar was the imperial decree which banished for a season all the Jewish community from Rome. Among the victims of the decree were the tentmaker of Pontus and his wife, Aquila and Priscilla, whom Paul met with and joined at Corinth. This imperial decree which banished the Jews does not appear to have long continued in force. When Paul wrote the Epistle to the Romans, some six or seven years later, Aquila and Priscilla had already returned to Rome; and when Paul was taken to the metropolis as a prisoner, he found many Jews there.