Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 19:24

"For a certain man named Demetrius, a silversmith, who made silver shrines of Diana, brought no little business unto the craftsmen;" — Acts 19:24 (ASV)

Demetrius, a silversmith, which made silver shrines for Diana.—The worship of Artemis (to give the Greek name of the goddess whom the Romans identified with their Diana) had from a very early period been connected with the city of Ephesus. The first temple owed much of its magnificence to Croesus.

This was burned down in 335 BC by Herostratus, who was impelled by an insane desire thus to secure an immortality of renown. Under Alexander the Great, it was rebuilt with more stateliness than ever and was looked upon as one of the seven wonders of the world.

Its porticos were adorned with paintings and sculptures by the great masters of Greek art: Phidias and Polycletus, Calliphron, and Apelles. It had an establishment of priests, attendants, and boys, which reminds us of the organisation of a great cathedral or abbey in medieval Europe.

Provision was made for the education of the children employed in the temple services, and retiring pensions were given to priests and priestesses (reminding us, in the latter instance, of the rule of 1 Timothy 5:9, which it may indeed have suggested) after the age of sixty.

Among the former was one class known as Theologi, interpreters of the mysteries of the goddess; a name which apparently suggested the application of that title (the Divine, the Theologus) to St. John in his character as an apocalyptic seer, as seen in the superscription of the Revelation.

Large gifts and bequests were made for the maintenance of its fabric and ritual, and the city conferred its highest honours upon those who thus enrolled themselves among its illustrious benefactors. Pilgrims came from all parts of the world to worship or to gaze, and carried away with them memorials in silver or bronze, generally models of the sacellum, or sanctuary, in which the image of the goddess stood, and of the image itself.

That image, however, was very unlike the sculptured beauty with which Greek and Roman art loved to represent the form of Artemis. It would seem to have been the survival of an older cultus of the powers of nature, like the Phrygian worship of Cybele, modified and renamed by the Greek settlers who took the place of the original inhabitants.

A fourfold, many-breasted female figure, ending below the breasts in a square column with mysterious symbolic ornamentation (in which bees, ears of corn, and flowers were strangely mingled), and carved in wood, black with age, and with no form or beauty—this was the centre of the adoration of that never-ceasing stream of worshippers.

As we look at the more elaborate reproductions of that type in marble, one of which can be seen in the Vatican Museum, we seem to be gazing on a Hindu idol rather than on a Greek statue.

Its ugliness was, perhaps, the secret of its power. When art clothes idolatry with beauty, people feel at liberty to criticise the artist and his work, and the feeling of reverence gradually becomes weaker. The savage bows before his fetish with a blinder homage than that which Pericles gave to the Jupiter of Phidias.

The first real blow to the worship that had lasted for so many ages was given by the two years of St. Paul’s work of which we read here. By a strange irony of history, the next stroke aimed at its magnificence came from the hand of Nero, who robbed it of many of its art treasures for the adornment of his Golden House at Rome (Tacitus, Annals 15.45)—just as he robbed the temples of Delphi, Pergamus, and Athens, not even sparing villages.

Trajan sent its richly sculptured gates as an offering to a temple at Byzantium. As the Church of Christ advanced, its worship, of course, declined. Priests and priestesses ministered in deserted shrines.

When the empire became Christian, the temple of Ephesus, in common with that of Delphi, supplied materials for the church, erected by Justinian, in honour of the Divine Wisdom, which is now the Mosque of St. Sophia. When the Goths devastated Asia Minor in the reign of Gallienus (AD 263), they plundered it with a reckless hand, and the work that they began was completed centuries later by the Turks.

The whole city, bearing the name of Aioslouk—in which some have traced the words Hagios Theologos, as applied to St. John as the patron saint—has fallen into such decay that the very site of the temple was, until a few years ago, a matter of dispute among archaeologists.

Mr. George Wood, however, in 1869, commenced a series of excavations that have led to the discoveries of strata corresponding to the foundations of the three temples that had been erected on the same site, enabled him to trace the ground plan, and brought to light many inscriptions connected with the temple (one in particular, the trust deed, so to speak, of a large sum given for its support), from which we learn more than was previously known about its priesthood and their organisation. (See Wood’s Ephesus, pp. 4–45.)

The word for “shrine” is the one that, though translated “temple” in John 2:19 (see the note there) and elsewhere, is always applied to the inner sanctuary, where the Divine Presence was supposed to dwell, and therefore, here, to the chapel or shrine in which the statue of the goddess stood. It was to the rest of the building what the Confession and the Tribune are in Italian churches.