Biblion Bible Commentary
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Stoned, and back the way they came
Acts 14:19-23
19 But some Jews from Antioch and Iconium came there, and having persuaded the multitudes, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead. · WEB
The crowd that wanted to sacrifice to him stones him instead, and Paul walks back into the same city the next morning.
But some Jews from Antioch and Iconium came there. They have traveled roughly a hundred miles overland to pursue two men who had already left their towns. That measures the seriousness of the opposition better than any adjective.
What they do is persuade the multitudes — the same crowd that a few days earlier was leading oxen up the street to sacrifice. The reversal takes no time at all. A town that will treat visitors as gods on the strength of one miracle is a town that has no stable view of them, and enthusiasm of that kind converts into rage without passing through anything in between.
The stoning is reported in one clause and its aftermath in another: they dragged him out of the city, supposing that he was dead. The dragging is the treatment of a corpse rather than a punishment, and the assumption of the men who did it is recorded rather than corrected. The narrative does not say whether he was dead. It says what they supposed, and it declines to go further — which is the same restraint the writer used with the shadow at Jerusalem.
Then: But as the disciples stood around him, he rose up, and entered into the city. There are disciples at Lystra, which means the preaching had taken hold before the stoning. They stand around the body, and he gets up, and the first thing he does is walk back through the gate he was dragged out of. Nothing is said about how he felt.
The next day he goes to Derbe, and after preaching there the pair do the thing that defines the whole enterprise: they returned to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch. Three cities. In the first he was stoned; from the second he fled a plan to stone him; from the third he was expelled. There was an easier road home — Derbe sat near a pass that would have taken them overland to Syria without revisiting any of it. They went back the way they came.
The reason is given in the participles rather than announced: strengthening the souls of the disciples, exhorting them to continue in the faith. New believers in those towns had watched their teachers driven out and would draw conclusions. The return visit is the argument that the message was worth what it cost.
And the content of the exhortation is honest about the price: through many afflictions we must enter into God's Kingdom. The pronoun is we, spoken by a man who had recently been dragged out of one of those towns for dead. He is not warning them about a hardship he has been spared.
The last act is administrative and is the reason the churches survived. They appointed elders for them in every assembly, prayed with fasting, and commended them to the Lord on whom they had believed. Congregations perhaps a few months old, in towns that had rioted against the gospel, are given local leadership and then left. The commending is the important verb: the two who planted them hand them over to God rather than to a system, and get on the road.
settled What this mark means