Acts 13:9

Acts 13:9. Then Saul (who also is called Paul). This abrupt statement of the writer of the ‘Acts' is the only explanation given of a change in the great apostle's name. Before the visit to the coast of the governor of Cyprus he is always called Saul; after the visit to Cyprus he is ever spoken of as Paul. By this name in all his epistles he speaks of himself; by this name James and the Jerusalem Council write of him in their letters to the Gentile churches (Acts 15:25); by this name Peter years after speaks of him, calling him ‘his beloved brother Paul' (2 Peter 3:15). The question arises, Whence came this second name? Two distinct classes of explanation have been suggested: (a) He received the name of Paul at this time in Cyprus, and in some way or other the name is connected with his friend and convert, the Roman Sergius Paulus. Either the grateful proconsul, finding the Christian missionaries, from whom he had learned the way of salvation, would receive no recompense or reward, persuaded the more prominent of the two to exchange his Jewish for his own illustrious Gentile appellation, as a memorial of what he had received from them, or his friends gave him the name in memory of the work done in Cyprus. (b) Saul possessed the Gentile name of Paul even before he was a Christian. This adoption of a Gentile name in addition to the original Hebrew name was a practice well known among the Jews. Thus we find Belteshazzar Daniel; Esther Hadassah; Simon Peter, in the present chapter Simeon Niger; John Mark; so in the case of the Jew of Tarsus, Saul Paulus: ‘Saul, who also is called Paul.' Paul, it must be remembered, was a Hellenistic Jew and also a Roman citizen, and as such very probably, indeed, possessed two names the one Hebrew, the other Latin. On the whole, the second explanation seems the more probable account of the two names of the Gentile apostle. From this time onward the Roman name ‘Paul' is only made use of. Hitherto the life of the Pharisee of Tarsus had been spent almost exclusively among Jews; from henceforth his life and work lay among the Gentile subjects of Rome, who would know and speak of the great apostle only as ‘Paul of Tarsus.'

Filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him. From the narrative it is clear that the Jewish teachers the true and the false met together in the presence of the Roman governor, who, in the end, was convinced by the arguments and power of Paul. The disputes turned, no doubt, on the meaning of the words of the old prophets of Israel respecting the coming of Messiah, His kingdom here, and His future sitting in judgment. The clever Magian evidently gave a false meaning to the words and prophecies, perhaps asserting that the resurrection of the dead was past already, as did the false teacher alluded to in 2 Timothy 2:18 (see also Colossians 2:8); for Paul, in Acts 13:10, recognises in his burning reproaches Elymas' power and ability ‘O full of subtilty and all mischief' and charges him with endeavouring, by his false though fair-seeming teaching, to prevent the noble Sergius Paulus from walking in the ways in which man should walk before God. As is so often the case in false teaching, the restraints to evil living, the checks to a selfish, luxurious, indulgent life, which a belief in the Messiah of Paul always imposes, were removed by the loose, imperfect doctrine of the Jewish Magian.