Biblion Bible Commentary
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Two hours of shouting, and a town clerk
Acts 19:32-41
32 Some therefore cried one thing, and some another, for the assembly was in confusion. Most of them didn’t know why they had come together. · WEB
A pagan official disperses the riot by pointing out that the accused have broken no law — the fourth Roman authority in this book to find nothing against the church.
The assembly is in confusion and some therefore cried one thing, and some another. The Jewish community, alarmed at being blamed for a movement it had disowned, pushes forward a man named Alexander to make a defense. The crowd works out that he is a Jew and shouts him down.
The detail is grimly funny and entirely serious: all with one voice for a time of about two hours cried out, "Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!" Two hours of a single sentence, from a crowd most of whom did not know why they had come. What the passage records is not an argument being lost but a city refusing to have one.
The man who ends it is the town clerk, the senior civic official who answered to the Roman administration for the conduct of the city. His speech is a small masterpiece of crowd management, and every move in it is calculated.
He begins by conceding everything that costs him nothing. Who does not know that Ephesus is temple keeper of the great Artemis and of the image that fell from heaven? Seeing then that these things can't be denied, you ought to be quiet and to do nothing rash. If the goddess is as secure as you say, she does not need a riot.
Then the finding, and it is the sentence that matters: you have brought these men here, who are neither robbers of temples nor blasphemers of your goddess. A pagan magistrate, in a city whose economy runs on that temple, states publicly that the Christians have committed no offense against it. Paul had preached for over two years that gods made with hands are not gods, and had evidently done it without vandalism and without abusing the goddess by name — which is why the charge cannot be made to stick.
He then points to the proper procedures. If Demetrius has a case, the courts are open and there are proconsuls. Anything else belongs in the regular assembly. A man with a genuine grievance has two lawful routes, and has chosen neither.
And he closes with the argument that actually empties the theater: we are in danger of being accused concerning today's riot, there being no cause. A city that could not account for a disorder of this size risked losing its privileges, and every man there knew it. He appeals to self-interest last, having established the law first, and the assembly is dismissed.
This is the fourth time an official of the empire has examined the church and found nothing — a proconsul at Paphos convinced, a proconsul at Corinth dismissing the case, magistrates at Philippi apologizing, and now a town clerk at Ephesus. The pattern is deliberate, and it will run through the rest of the book to a tribune, two governors and a king. The consistent verdict of Roman authority in this book is that the movement is not a crime.
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