Acts 20:29

ἐγώ οἶδα with אABCD. Vulg. ‘ego scio.’

29. μετὰ τὴν ἄφιξίν μου, after my departing. This noun is only found here in N.T. In classical Greek it most frequently means ‘arrival,’ but not always. But as the person who arrives at one place must have departed from some other, it is only a change in the point of view. Here there is no doubt of its meaning. It does not refer to St Paul’s death, but to his departure from Asia, with the thought that he should return no more.

λύκοι βαρεῖς, grievous wolves. The Apostle seems first to refer to false teachers who should come in from without. He must have been familiar with the dangers to which the Ephesian Church was exposed, and we know from his Epistles how much harm had already been inflicted on the Christian Church by the Judaizers and Gnostics. Even when writing to so undisturbed a Church as that in Philippi, we find the Apostle giving warning against both kinds of error. And if we turn to those early parts of the Apocalypse in which the condition of the Churches of Asia is described, we can read of a crop of errors the sowers of which St Paul may have had in his mind as he spake at Miletus. ‘Nicolaitans,’ ‘those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan,’ ‘those that hold the teaching of Balaam,’ ‘the woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess,’ all these could not have risen in a moment, but must have given indications of their existence long before they became so prominent as they were when St John wrote. He must have read the New Testament with little appreciation who speaks of the words here ascribed to St Paul as a ‘prophecy after the event’ made by the writer of the Acts in the second century. Cf. ‘Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’ § 16.