Biblion Bible Commentary
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Apollos, taught more accurately
Acts 18:24-28
24 Now a certain Jew named Apollos, an Alexandrian by race, an eloquent man, came to Ephesus. He was mighty in the Scriptures. · WEB
A gifted preacher with an incomplete message is corrected privately by a working couple, and becomes more useful than either of them could have been.
Apollos is introduced with a string of credentials: a Jew, an Alexandrian by race, an eloquent man, and mighty in the Scriptures. Alexandria was the great center of Jewish learning outside Jerusalem. The word for eloquent covers both learning and skill in speech. And to be mighty in the Scriptures is the highest praise this book gives anyone.
He is also, in one respect, wrong. This man had been instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in spirit, he spoke and taught accurately the things concerning Jesus, although he knew only the baptism of John.
That is a carefully balanced sentence and each clause matters. He had been taught; he was fervent; what he taught about Jesus was accurate as far as it went. The deficiency is specific and is not doctrinal error — he knew the message of repentance that John preached and evidently not what had happened at Pentecost. He is preaching a true account that stops in the wrong decade.
He began to speak boldly in the synagogue, and there Priscilla and Aquila hear him. Consider the disparity. He is a trained Alexandrian orator with a public platform. They are tentmakers who have been in town a few months, refugees from an imperial expulsion, with no title of any kind in the narrative.
What they do is exactly right and is described in six words: they took him aside, and explained to him the way of God more accurately. They took him aside — not a correction from the floor, not a rival meeting, not a letter to Jerusalem. The comparative more accurately picks up the same word used of his own teaching a verse earlier, so the writer is saying that what was already accurate was made more so. Nothing was demolished. Something was completed.
And Priscilla is named first here as well, in the act of teaching a famous preacher, and the text passes over it as unremarkable.
The response says as much about Apollos as the intervention says about them. A man with his gifts and his audience took private instruction from two artisans and changed what he said. Nothing suggests it cost him anything he minded losing.
What follows is the church at its most practical. He decides to cross to Achaia, the brothers encourage him, and wrote to the disciples to receive him — a letter of introduction, which is how a stranger with no standing gained a hearing in a distant congregation. The corrected man is not merely tolerated; he is commended and sent.
And the result justifies the whole procedure: he greatly helped those who had believed through grace; for he powerfully refuted the Jews, publicly showing by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. The gifts that made him formidable are unchanged; only the content has been finished, and a man who was preaching an out-of-date message becomes the most effective public advocate the Corinthian church had.
He is doing the same work Paul did in that city, by the same method, from the same Scriptures. The congregation there would later divide into parties over the two of them, which neither of them wanted 1 Corinthians 3:4–6.
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