Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 20:18

"And when they were come to him, he said unto them, Ye yourselves know, from the first day that I set foot in Asia, after what manner I was with you all the time," — Acts 20:18 (ASV)

You know, from the first day that I came into Asia...—No discourse recorded in the Acts is so full of living personal interest. Saint Luke would naturally be present at the meeting, and able to take notes of the address, and reproduce it almost, if not altogether, word for word. It bears on its face internal marks of genuineness.

No writer of a history adorned with fictitious speeches could have written a discourse so essentially Pauline in all its turns and touches of thought and phraseology, in its tenderness and sympathy, its tremulous anxieties, its frank assertions of the fullness of his teaching and the self-denying labours of his life, its sense of the infinite responsibility of the ministerial office for himself and others, its apprehension of coming dangers from without and from within the Church. The words present a striking parallel to the appeal of Samuel to the people in 1 Samuel 12:3.