Biblion Bible Commentary
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Cyprus: a proconsul and a magician
Acts 13:4-12
4 So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia. From there they sailed to Cyprus. · WEB
The first opposition on the road is a religious operator with access to power, and the confrontation gives Paul his name and his method.
They go down to the port of Seleucia and sail to Cyprus, which is Barnabas' home island, and at Salamis they do what they will do in every city for the next fifteen chapters: they proclaimed God's word in the Jewish synagogues. There is no strategy document, and this is the strategy. The synagogue held people who already read the Scriptures the argument would be made from, and it held the God-fearers.
They cross the island to Paphos , the seat of the Roman administration, and there the account slows down for a set piece. Three figures are introduced: a proconsul, his attendant magician, and the two missionaries.
The magician is described in a stacked series of terms — a certain sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew whose name was Bar Jesus — and each addition makes him worse. A sorcerer is bad; a false prophet is worse; a Jewish false prophet, attached to a Roman governor as a religious specialist, is a man making a living from his people's Scriptures by using them for something they were not for. His name means son of Joshua, and the irony of a man called that opposing this message is not remarked on.
The proconsul is introduced with two words of unexpected respect: a man of understanding. He is the one who takes the initiative — he summoned Barnabas and Saul, and sought to hear the word of God. A senior Roman official is intellectually curious about a Jewish message and sends for the men preaching it.
The magician's motive is stated plainly and it is professional. He withstood them, seeking to turn the proconsul away from the faith, because a governor persuaded by these two has no further need of the man on his staff who reads omens.
And here the writer drops in a note that changes the book's cast list without a word of explanation: But Saul, who is also called Paul. From this verse he is Paul everywhere. The two names are not a conversion souvenir; a Jew of the diaspora with Roman citizenship would carry both a Hebrew and a Roman name from birth, and the shift happens at the moment the mission turns fully toward the Roman world. From here on he also leads — the pairing, which has been Barnabas and Saul throughout, becomes Paul and his company in the very next verse.
The rebuke is the harshest speech Paul makes to anyone. You son of the devil is a deliberate unmaking of the man's name: not son of Joshua, but son of the enemy. The charge is specific — he perverts the right ways of the Lord, making straight paths crooked — and the sentence fits it. He will be blind for a season, which is a temporary punishment with a term set, and it is precisely what happened to Paul himself on a road to Damascus. The man who groped for a hand to lead him is now sentencing another man to do the same, and the limit on the sentence is the shape of his own mercy.
The proconsul believed — being astonished at the teaching of the Lord. Not at the blindness. At the teaching.
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