Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 16

A certain disciple was there, named Timotheus.—We read with a special interest the first mention of the name of one who was afterwards so dear to the Apostle, his “true son in the faith” (1 Timothy 1:2). On his probable conversion on St. Paul’s first mission in Lystra, see Notes on Acts 14:6; Acts 14:19.

We have to think of him as still young; probably, as his youth is spoken of some twelve years later in 1 Timothy 4:12, not more than eighteen or twenty; but in the six years that had passed since St. Paul’s departure he had been conspicuous for his devotion and “unfeigned faith.” He had been trained to know the sacred Books of Israel from his childhood (2 Timothy 3:15); and the fact that he had obtained a good report from the brethren at Iconium as well as Lystra shows that he had been already employed in carrying on interaction between the two churches.

The way in which St. Paul writes to him, and of him, implies a constitution naturally not strong, and, in after life, weakened by a rigorous asceticism (1 Timothy 5:23), emotional even to tears (2 Timothy 1:4), naturally shrinking from hardships and responsibilities, yet facing them in the strength of Christ (1 Corinthians 16:10). The name Timotheus was not uncommon. It is found in 2 Maccabees 12:21-24, as belonging to a general defeated by Judas Maccabeus, and appears in early Christian inscriptions in the Vatican Museum. Its meaning (“one who honours God”) made it a suitable name for the child of a proselyte.

The son of a certain woman.—Literally, of a certain woman, a faithful (or believing) Jewess. The adjective is the same as that used by Lydia of herself in Acts 16:15. 2 Timothy 1:4, tells us that her name was Eunike, and her mother’s Lois. They were both devout, and had trained the child in the Law (2 Timothy 3:15); and this makes it probable that the father was a proselyte of the gate. He naturally thought it sufficient that his child should grow up under the same religious conditions as himself, and they had either thought so, or had yielded to his will.

His father was a Greek.—Literally, of a Greek father. The adjective is used, as in the New Testament generally, to express the fact that he was a heathen. (See Notes on Acts 11:20; Mark 7:26.) It seems, on the whole, probable that he was still living.

And took and circumcised him. The act seems at first inconsistent with Saint Paul’s conduct regarding Titus (Galatians 2:3) and with his general teaching regarding circumcision (Galatians 5:2–6).

The circumstances of the two cases were, however, different, and there were adequate reasons here for the course Paul adopted.

1. The act was spontaneous. People may rightly concede as a favor, or as a matter of expediency, what they would be justified in resisting when it is demanded as a matter of necessity.

2. Titus was a Greek, pure and simple (Galatians 2:3). However, Timothy's mixed parentage, according to the received canons of Jewish law, meant he inherited from the nobler side. He was therefore by birth in the same position as an Israelite.

3. By not urging circumcision before baptism, or before his admission to that “breaking of bread”—which was then, as it was later, the witness of full communion with Christ—the Apostle had shown that he did not consider it essential for admission into the Christian Church or for continued fellowship with it. In what he did now, he was simply acting on his declared principle of becoming to the Jews as a Jew (see Notes on Acts 18:18; 1 Corinthians 9:20). He was also guarding against the difficulties he would have encountered from those he sought to win for Christ, if they had seen an Israelite in the traveling company who was ashamed of the seal of the covenant of Abraham.

The acceptance of that seal by one who had grown up to manhood without it may be noted as showing that the disciple had absorbed the spirit of his Master. It seems probable, from Timothy's youth, that at this period he took the place Mark had previously filled, acting chiefly as an attendant, with the “work of an evangelist” coming later (2 Timothy 4:5).

They delivered them the decrees.—The number of copies which the process implies is in itself a sufficient guarantee that what St. Luke gives is a faithful transcript. The decrees were clearly still regarded by the Gentile converts as being the charter on which they might take their stand in any dispute with the Judaisers, and doubtless helped to determine many who had previously hesitated, to seek admission into the Church.

When they had gone throughout Phrygia and the region of Galatia.—In the previous journey, St. Paul, when he was at Antioch in Pisidia, was just on the border of the two provinces, but had not travelled through them, Phrygia lying to the west and Galatia to the north-east. The former name was used with an ethnological rather than a political significance and, at this period, did not designate a Roman province.

It does not possess any special points of interest in connection with St. Paul’s work, except as including the churches of the valley of the Lycus—Colossae, Laodicea, and Thyatira—but the latter was the scene of some of his most important labours.

The province was named after the Galatae, or Gauls, who had poured over Greece and Asia Minor in the third century B.C., as they had also done over Italy in the fourth century B.C. It had been assigned to them by Attalus I, King of Pergamus, and was later conquered by the Romans under Manlius (the name appearing a second time in connection with a victory over the Gallic races) in 189 B.C. Under Augustus, it was constituted as a Roman province.

The inhabitants spoke a Celtic dialect, like that which people of the same race spoke in the fourth century A.D. on the banks of the Moselle, and they retained all the distinctive quickness of emotion and liability to sudden change that characterised the Celtic temperament. They had adopted the religion of the Phrygians, who had previously inhabited the region. That religion consisted mainly in a wild, orgiastic worship of the great Earth-goddess Cybele, in whose temples were found eunuch priests who thus consecrated themselves to her service (see note on Galatians 5:12). The chief seat of this worship was at Pessinus.

The incidental reference to this journey in Galatians 4:13-15 enables us to fill in St. Luke’s outline. St. Paul seems to have been detained in Galatia by severe illness. This was probably one of the attacks of acute pain in the nerves of the eye, which many writers have seen as an explanation of the mysterious thorn in the flesh mentioned in 2 Corinthians 12:7. This illness led to his giving a longer time to his missionary work there than he had at first intended. During this illness, the Galatians had shown themselves singularly devoted to him. They had received him as an angel of God, even as Christ Jesus.

They had not shrunk from what would seem to have been repulsive in the malady from which he suffered; they would have plucked out their own eyes, had it been possible, and given them to him to replace those which were the cause of so much suffering to him. Then they thought it their highest blessedness to have had such a one among them. If the memory of that reception made his sorrow all the more bitter when, in later years, they fell away from their first love, it must, at the time, have been among the most cheering seasons of the Apostle’s life.

Were forbidden of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia.—This obviously implies that their own plans would have led them to turn their steps to the region from which they were thus turned. The pro-consular province of Asia, with its teeming cities, like Ephesus, Smyrna, and Sardis, its large Jewish population, and its great centres of idolatrous worship, was naturally attractive to one who was seeking with all his energy a rapid expansion of the kingdom of his Lord.

But in ways which we are not told—by inner promptings, or by visions of the night, or by the inspired utterances of those among their converts who had received the gift of prophecy (as afterwards in Acts 21:4)—they were led on, step by step, towards the north-western coast, not yet seeing their way clearly to the next stage of their labours. Their route through the “Galatian region” (the phrase, perhaps, indicates a wider range of country than the Roman province of that name) must have taken them through Pessinus, the great centre of the worship of Cybele, and Ancyra, famous for its goat's-hair manufactures, and for the great historical marble tablets which Augustus had erected there.

They assayed to go into Bithynia.—The verse describes very vividly the uncertainty produced day by day by this conflict between human plans and divine direction. Bithynia, lying to the north, had, like Pontus, a considerable Jewish population scattered along its shores, and they were inclined to take that as their next field of labor. They were led on, however, as before, westward and not northward. There is no record of any considerable halt in this stage of their journey, and they probably found few favorable openings in a district which, for a great part of the way, presented only unimportant villages. The use of the archaic form “assayed” for “essayed,” or “attempted,” calls for a word of notice. (Compare to Acts 9:26.)

The Spirit suffered them not.—The better manuscripts and versions give the reading, the Spirit of Jesus, which is of some dogmatic importance, as confirming the doctrine that the Spirit stands in the same relation to the Son as to the Father, and may therefore be spoken of either as the Spirit of God, or of Christ (Romans 8:9), or of Jesus.