Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 17:5

"But the Jews, being moved with jealousy, took unto them certain vile fellows of the rabble, and gathering a crowd, set the city on an uproar; and assaulting the house of Jason, they sought to bring them forth to the people." — Acts 17:5 (ASV)

The Jews which believed not.—The latter words are missing in many manuscripts, as “filled with envy” are in others.

Certain lewd fellows of the baser sort.—The word “lewd” is used in its older sense, meaning vile or worthless. At a still earlier stage of its history, as in Chaucer and the Vision of Piers Plowman (for example, in lines such as these):

“How you teach the people,
The learned and the unlearned,” i. 2100.

In this earlier usage, it meant simply the layman, or untaught person, as distinct from the scholar. The “baser sort” answers to a Greek word describing the loungers in the agora, or market-place, ever ready for the excitement of a tumult—the sub-rostrani or turba forensis of Latin writers. Men of such a class, retaining its old habits, are found even among Christian converts in 2 Thessalonians 3:11, “working not at all, but busybodies.”

Assaulted the house of Jason.—The ground of the attack was that he had received the preachers as his guests. The name Jason was locally conspicuous as having belonged to the old hero of the Argonautic expedition and to the tyrant of Pherae. It is probable, however, that Saint Paul would, in the first instance, take up his abode with a Jew, and that Jason, as in the case of the apostate high priest mentioned in 2 Maccabees 4:7, was the Greek equivalent for Joshua or Jesus.

To bring them out to the people.—Thessalonica was a free Greek city, and the Jews accordingly, in the first instance, intended to bring the matter before the popular ecclesia or assembly.