Acts 19:19

Acts 19:19. Many of them also which used curious arte. This specifies the practices of some of these professing believers, notwithstanding their professions of faith. Many of these nominal Christians, some no doubt by way of trade and commerce, others because they shrank from giving up their old belief in incantation, love philtres, and other dark and superstitious arts, still while worshipping in the assembly of believers in Jesus, while repeating the solemn Christian formulas, while listening with apparent attention to the words of a Paul, no doubt while partaking in the most solemn Christian rites, many, we read, still were using curious, that is, unclean, superstitious rites, such as were common in Ephesus.

Brought their books together, and burned them before all men. These books were, no doubt, parchment or papyrus volumes, filled with these partly Jewish, partly heathenish incantations, recipes for love philtres, formulas more or less ancient to be used in casting out evil spirits, and the like. Ephesus, we know, swarmed with magicians and astrologers; and a portion of the trade of the city, whither resorted so many pilgrims to the shrine of Diana, consisted in these works and formularies of incantation. The famous' Έφίσια γράμματα. ‘Ephesian letters' or spells, to which allusion is frequently made by heathen writers, no doubt formed part of this unholy property which these Christians, at last awakened to the knowledge of their own inconsistent lives, burned in this public fashion ‘before all men.' These ‘Ephesian letters' were small slips of parchment in silk bags, on which were written strange cabalistic words and sentences, mysterious and often apparently meaningless. These, men and women were in the habit of carrying about on their persons as charms or amulets to shield them from danger and from harm, or to procure them good fortune in their undertakings. We read how Crœsus, when on his funeral pile, repeated these ‘Ephesian spells.' Again we are told, how once in the Olympian games an Ephesian wrestler struggled successfully with his opponent from Miletus, because he had wound round his ankle some of these ‘Ephesian charms,' but that being deprived of them he was twice overthrown (Eustathius, quoted by Gloag).

And they counted the price of them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver. If these pieces of silver referred to were Jewish money (shekel), the sum would be enormous, about £7000, which would represent a much larger sum if we take into consideration the present purchasing power of money. It is, however, far more probable that in an Asiatic, or rather Grecian, city under Roman rule, the Roman denarius or Attic drachma was the piece of silver alluded to. The amount would then be roughly about £1800, this, of course, representing a much larger sum considering the diminished value of money in our day. This great amount must be accounted for by remembering that the books in question were, no doubt, of exceeding rarity, and possessed a peculiar value of their own from the precious secrets they were supposed to contain.