Acts 20:3

Acts 20:3. And there abode three months. With these few words the writer of the ‘Acts' refers to this second and shorter residence of the apostle in his old Corinthian home. Much had happened in that restless, busy centre since his first long stay, when he laid the foundation stories of the church there. He had been absent some three years, and in that period in the Christian community at Corinth had taken place, as the church increased, the disputes concerning the Lord's Supper; the heart-burnings excited by party attachments to one or other of the early Christian leaders, himself, Peter, and Apollos; the agitation occasioned by the immoral and impure lives lived by professing members of the brotherhood. The duty of relieving and assisting brothers and sisters unknown and living in far countries, but professing the same faith; and the general duty of almsgiving, and other questions connected with doctrine and life and ritual, which have in all the Christian ages agitated and often perplexed the Church of Christ, had been prominently brought before the Corinthian congregations. And on all these questions he had given them advice, exhortation, and warning, by messages despatched through true and trusty friends, such as Timothy and Titus; by grave and weighty letters written under the influence of the Holy Spirit, such as the First and Second Corinthian Epistles, letters which have served as handbooks to the practical Christian life for eighteen hundred years; and now he was come among them once more to watch the result of his work. During the ‘three months' of his stay at Corinth, St. Paul wrote the great epistle to the Roman Church. The Galatian letter possibly was written, too, at this time; but it seems more likely that this shorter letter, in which the main arguments of the letter to the Church of Rome were first sketched out, was written during the stay at Ephesus in the course of the preceding year.

And when the Jews laid wait for him, as he was about to sail into Syria. We are not informed as to the nature of this plot formed against St. Paul by his unhappy countrymen. All through his busy, anxious life their terrible and sleepless hostility dogged his footsteps. Their machinations usually took the form of intrigue with the local authorities or with the people of the city, where the apostle was working; but at times their intense hatred took a more active shape, and they made use of certain fanatics of their race, and attempted by violent means to cut short the detested career of him they persisted in looking upon as the bitterest foe to the Jewish traditions. See for other murderous attempts of this kind, chap. Acts 9:23-29, at Damascus and Jerusalem; and at a later period again at Jerusalem, chap, Acts 23:12. It was most likely that the Jews on this occasion, becoming aware of St. Paul's intention to sail from Cenchrea, one of the ports of Corinth (Phœbe, Romans 16:1, the bearer of the epistle to the Roman Church, was a deaconess of the church of this place, which was in fact a seaside suburb of populous Corinth), watched the harbour in order to surprise him and kill him. There were many Jews resident in this seaside quarter of the great city engaged in commerce. It was to this harbour that most of the ships sailing between Greece and Asia belonged. Their occupation would give them peculiar influence over the captains and owners of all trading vessels, and from these they doubtless heard of the apostle's intentions. But the plot was discovered, and St. Paul determined to proceed northwards by land, through Macedonia by way of Philippi.