Acts 19:16

ἐφαλλόμενος; only here in N.T.; in LXX, 1Sa 10:6; 1 Samuel 11:6; 1 Samuel 16:13. κατακυρ.; only here in Luke; Matthew 20:25; Mark 10:42; 1 Peter 5:3; frequent in LXX. αὐτῶν, see critical note. There is no real difficulty if we read ἀμφοτέρων after ἑπτά, Acts 19:14; St. Luke had mentioned that seven of the sons of Sceva made the attempt to imitate Paul, but the incident which he describes introduces two of them only. ἀμφ. cannot be taken distributively, or with Ewald, neuter, as if = ἀμφοτέρωθεν. γυμνοὺς : may mean with torn garments, not literally naked, so Grimm-Thayer, sub v., and Alford. ἐκείνου : the pronoun seems to imply that the writer had a definite place before his eyes, although it is not fully described. But it is surely a mark of truthfulness that the narrative ends where it does; a forger, we may well believe, would have crowned the story by a picture of the man, after baffling the impostors, healed by the word or touch of Paul (see Plumptre's remarks, in loco). The marked contrast between the New Testament in its description of the demonised and their healing, and the notions and practices which meet us in the Jewish Rabbi, may be seen in Edersheim's valuable appendix, Jesus the Messiah, ii., 770 ff., and the same decisive contrast is also seen between the N.T. and the prevailing ideas of the first century in the cures of the demonised attributed to Apollonius of Tyana in this same city Ephesus and in Athens; Smith and Wace, Dictionary of the Christian Biography, i., 136. Ramsay is very severe on the whole narrative, St. Paul, p. 273, and regards it as a mere piece of current gossip; so, too, very similarly, Wendt (1899), note, p. 313, who refers, as so many have done, to the analogy between the narrative in Acts 19:11 and that in Acts 5:12; Acts 5:15; in other words, to the parallel between Peter and Paul (which the writer of Acts is supposed to draw on every possible occasion; see introd.). So too Hilgenfeld ascribes the whole section Acts 19:11-20 to his “author to Theophilus,” and sees in it a story to magnify St. Paul's triumph over sorcery and magic, as St. Peter's over Simon Magus in Acts 8:13. Clemen with Spitta, Van Manen, and others regard the whole section as interrupting the connection between Acts 19:10; Acts 19:21 but even here, in Acts 19:14, Clemen sees in addition the hand of his Redactor Antijudaicus, as distinct from the Redactor to whom the whole narrative is otherwise attributed.