Biblion Bible Commentary
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Sailing past Ephesus, hurrying to Jerusalem
Acts 20:13-16
13 But we, going ahead to the ship, set sail for Assos, intending to take Paul aboard there; for he had so arranged, intending himself to go by land. · WEB
Four verses of coastline hide a deliberate choice: Paul walks alone for twenty miles and then avoids the city he loved most.
The narrative slows to a ship's log — Assos, Mitylene, opposite Chios, Samos, Miletus — and the detail is the sort a passenger keeps rather than a historian composes. Each name is a day's sailing.
Inside it sits an arrangement that the writer records without explaining. We, going ahead to the ship, set sail for Assos, intending to take Paul aboard there; for he had so arranged, intending himself to go by land. The ship rounds the headland to Assos ; Paul walks across it, some twenty miles, alone.
Nothing is said about why. He has spent three years in constant company and is traveling toward a city where the Spirit has told him in every port that chains are waiting. A man who arranges to walk a day by himself before that is not hard to understand, and the text leaves him to it. It is the only glimpse in the book of Paul choosing solitude.
The second decision is stated with its reason attached. Paul had determined to sail past Ephesus, that he might not have to spend time in Asia; for he was hastening, if it were possible for him, to be in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost.
Both halves of that are worth holding. Ephesus was where he had worked longest and where he was loved most; a visit would have taken weeks, because such a visit always does. And the deadline is a Jewish festival. The apostle to the nations is racing the sailing season to reach a feast in Jerusalem, carrying money from Gentile churches, and the day he wants to arrive by is the anniversary of the outpouring that began the whole story.
The reckoning is also practical. Pentecost is fifty days after Passover; he left Philippi after Unleavened Bread and has already lost a week at Troas. Every stop now costs him days he does not have, and the great city on this coast is exactly the sort of stop that would cost him all of them.
So he does the next best thing, which is the substance of the following paragraph. From Miletus , thirty miles down the coast, he sends for the elders of the Ephesian church and waits for them to come to him. The compromise is characteristic: he will not spend the weeks, and he will not leave without saying what has to be said.
And the phrase if it were possible for him is left standing at the end of the sentence. He is hurrying toward a date he may not make, in a season of contrary winds, toward a city where he has been told what is waiting. The next paragraph is what he says to men he does not expect to see again.
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