Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 8:25

"They therefore, when they had testified and spoken the word of the Lord, returned to Jerusalem, and preached the gospel to many villages of the Samaritans." — Acts 8:25 (ASV)

And they, when they had testified . . .—The statement implies a stay of some duration, long enough to establish and organize a community of disciples. This was followed, not by an immediate return to Jerusalem, but, as the Greek tense shows, by a journey with many stops, at each of which the glad tidings of the word of the Lord were proclaimed, and a church was founded. Did the Apostles travel to the village where one of them had sought to call down fire from heaven (Luke 9:54)? Now, at least, he had learned what manner of Spirit claimed him as his own.

The curtain falls at the close of this drama on the Christians of Samaria, and we know very little of their later history. The one glimpse of them that we get is, however, of very special interest. When Paul and Barnabas, after their first missionary journey, went up to Jerusalem, they passed through Phenico and Samaria (Acts 15:3).

Saint Paul also had conquered the antagonism that divided the Jew, and, above all, the Pharisee, from the Samaritan. The Samaritans heard with joy of the conversion of the Gentiles, which showed that old barriers and walls of partition were broken down.

Many, we may believe, would choose to stand on the ground of the freedom of the gospel rather than on any claim to Jewish descent or the observance of the Jewish Law. Others, however, we know, adhered to that Law with rigorous tenacity and left their creed and ritual, their Gerizim worship, and their sacred Books as an inheritance to be handed down from century to century, even to the present day.

The whole nation suffered severely in the wars with Rome under Vespasian. Sychem was taken and destroyed, and a new city was built by the emperor on its ruins—a Roman city with Temples dedicated to Roman gods—to which, to perpetuate the name of his house and lineage, he gave the name Flavia Neapolis (= New Town), which survives in the modern Nablous.

In the early history of the Church, that city is also notable for having been the birthplace of the martyr Justin and of the heretic Dositheus. In one of the Simon legends, as stated above, the latter appears as the instructor of the sorcerer, but this is probably a distortion of his real history.