Biblion Bible Commentary
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Corinth: tentmakers, and a promise of many people
Acts 18:1-11
1 After these things Paul departed from Athens and came to Corinth. · WEB
Paul arrives alone, works a trade, is thrown out of the synagogue, and is told to stay eighteen months by a Lord who claims a city before it believes.
He goes from Athens to Corinth — from the university town to the port. Corinth was a commercial city with two harbors, a Roman colony rebuilt a century earlier, prosperous, crowded and with a reputation for vice that had made its name a byword.
He arrives alone and finds work. Aquila and Priscilla are Jews who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to depart from Rome — refugees of an imperial expulsion, and one of the firmest dates in the book. Paul joins them because he practiced the same trade, and the trade is named: tentmakers, workers in leather and coarse cloth.
The detail is important for what it says about the mission's economics. The apostle to the nations supported himself with his hands in the second largest city he worked in, and reasoned in the synagogue on the Sabbath — his one free day. Nothing in the narrative treats this as a comedown.
When Silas and Timothy arrive from Macedonia he was compelled by the Spirit, devoting himself to the word full time, which suggests they brought the gift from Philippi that let him stop working Philippians 4:15–16.
The break with the synagogue is dramatic and formal. He shook out his clothing and said to them, "Your blood be on your own heads! I am clean. From now on, I will go to the Gentiles!" The gesture is a prophetic one and the words are a watchman's: a watchman who warns is clear of the blood of those who ignore him Ezekiel 33:4–6. Paul is not losing his temper. He is discharging a responsibility and saying so in the terms Scripture gives.
Then the comedy of where he goes. He moves next door — to the house of Justus, a God-fearer, whose house was next door to the synagogue. The break is with an institution and not with a people, and he sets up his teaching within a wall's thickness of the building he was expelled from. The result is immediate: Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord with all his house, and many Corinthians believed and were baptized.
The vision that follows is the only one in the book given to steady a man rather than to direct him. Don't be afraid, but speak and don't be silent. The command implies the fear, and the fear is credible — he has been run out of three cities in a row and has just publicly broken with the synagogue in a fourth.
Two reasons are given, and the second is the remarkable one. For I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you — a promise of protection, which the next paragraph will show being kept in a Roman court. For I have many people in this city.
That is said before they believe. In a city famous for its corruption, God speaks of people who are already his and have not yet heard, and the reason Paul is to keep talking is that they exist. He stayed a year and six months, which is the longest settled ministry recorded so far, and the church he left behind was troublesome enough to require the two longest letters he ever wrote.
settled What this mark means