Acts 14:19

Change of feeling in the multitude. Paul is stoned. The Apostles visit Derbe, and then return, by the route by which they came, to Antioch in Syria

19. certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium Their anger, like that of "the circumcision" in Jerusalem, was roused against the Apostles, whom they knew to be born Jews, but who were casting away the legal restraints to which they themselves clung, and so they followed them to other places and represented them no doubt as renegade Jews, and probably taught the heathen people, that what they had seen done was done by evil powers and not by beneficent ones. Some such argument they must have used. The mighty work of the cured cripple bore witness for the realityof the Apostles" power. It was only left, therefore, to ascribe it to evil agency, as the Jews aforetime said of Christ "He casteth out devils through Beelzebub."

who persuaded the people Dean Howson (Life and Epp. of St Paul, i. 208) quotes from the Scholiast on Homer (Il. iv. 89 92) a passage in which the Lycaonians are described as untrustworthy, and Aristotle is given as authority for the statement. For a similar sudden change of temper in the populace, cp. the conduct of the multitude at Jerusalem just before the Crucifixion, and the sudden change of opinion in the people of Melita (Acts 28:6).

and, having stoned Paul Their jealous rage carried them to such a length that they became themselves the active agents in taking vengeance on the "chief speaker" of the two missionaries. This must be the stoning to which St Paul alludes (2 Corinthians 11:25), "Once was I stoned." And Paley (Horæ Paulinæ, p. 69) calls attention to the close agreement between the history of St Luke and the letter of St Paul. At Iconium St Paul had just escaped stoning; at Lystra he was stoned. The two circumstances are mentioned by the historian, only the actual suffering by the Apostle himself. Nothing but truth to guide them, says Paley, could have brought the two writers so close "to the very brink of contradiction without their falling into it."

drew him out of the city The stoning had not been in a place set apart for such executions, for there were few Jews in Lystra, but it had been done publicly in the midst of the city, perhaps in the place of public resort where St Paul had been wont to preach.