Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 16:6

"And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden of the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia;" — Acts 16:6 (ASV)

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.