Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
Even his shadow: the crowds from the towns
Acts 5:12-16
12 By the hands of the apostles many signs and wonders were done among the people. They were all with one accord in Solomon’s porch. · WEB
Public awe and public growth arrive together, and the report of what people expected from Peter is carefully distinguished from what God did.
The paragraph holds two facts that ought to pull against each other and do not. None of the rest dared to join them — the fear from the previous scene has kept the casual at a distance — however, the people honored them. And in the next breath, More believers were added to the Lord, multitudes of both men and women.
That combination is worth sitting with. A community that had become alarming to approach was simultaneously respected and growing fast. Fear thinned out the merely curious and did not thin out the converted, which suggests the two groups were being sorted rather than the movement being suppressed. The writer records the sorting without comment.
The apostles are in Solomon's porch, in public, doing openly what the council forbade them to do in chapter four. Many signs and wonders were done by their hands. There is no concealment anywhere in these chapters; the strategy, insofar as there is one, is to stand in the most trafficked colonnade of the temple and continue.
Then the detail about the shadow, and it needs reading carefully, because it is often reported as something the text does not say. People carried the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mattresses so that as Peter came by, at least his shadow might overshadow some of them. That is a statement about what the crowds hoped, not a statement about what the shadow did. The narrative gives their expectation and then gives the outcome separately: the multitudes came from the surrounding cities with the sick and the tormented, and they were all healed.
The distinction is not pedantry. This book is consistently careful to place the power where it belongs, and it has just spent a chapter on Peter refusing credit in the plainest terms — not by our own power or godliness. A writer who wanted to build a cult around an apostle's person had an opening here and did not take it. What is recorded is that ordinary people reached for whatever contact with him they could imagine, and that God healed them all, which are two different sentences.
The geography matters as well. The crowds now come from the cities around Jerusalem, which is the first widening in the book. The movement has not yet left Judea, but Judea has begun to come to it, and the second stage of the commission is being approached from the outside before anyone sets out.
What this paragraph finally establishes is the condition the authorities are about to react to. Whatever the council's prohibition achieved, it is now confronted with apostles teaching daily in the temple, sick people arriving from a dozen towns, and every one of them going home well. The next verse begins with the high priest rising up, and the word used for his motive is jealousy.
settled What this mark means