1st Missionary Trip - Lorin

ἐπὶ τοὺς πόδας σου ὀρθός, Stand upright on your feet. The response of the man was immediate: καὶ ἥλατο
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142 καὶ
περιεπάτει. And the man sprang up and began to walk. 143 This was dramatic and came somewhat surprisingly since
the crippled man did not ask to be healed.
Some important observations here. 1) Some affinity of Paul’s healing the crippled man at Lystra with
Peter’s healing of a crippled man in the temple at Jerusalem (Acts 3:1-10) clearly exist. Many are convinced that
this is another of Luke’s parallelisms between the ministries of Peter and Paul. 144 Perhaps this is so, although the
distinctives of each of the miracle narratives caution against assuming too close a parallel. 2) Paul connected
saving faith in Christ with the necessary requirement for this man’s healing: ἰδὼν ὅτι ἔχει πίστιν τοῦ σωθῆναι (cf.
also Mark. 5:34 and Luke 8:48 for Jesus doing the same). While the judgment miracle by Paul on Bar-Jesus at
Paphos on Cyprus earlier may have prompted a saving faith response from Sergius Paulus, the Roman proconsul
(Acts 13:12), clearly this crippled man in Lystra came to believe in Jesus and thus received something even
greater than the ability to walk. 3) Miracles in the New Testament connect spiritual deliverance from sin with
physical deliverance from disease and health problems. In contrast to the many miracle narratives in ancient
literature outside the New Testament, the miracles done by Jesus and the apostles always pointed ultimately to
the spiritual needs of the individual. They were never done for sensation or for personal monetary gain, as was
generally the case in the other miracle narratives. They were never done to assert supernatural powers of a human
being! The presence of God working in the life of the person is always the point, and that divine presence
is expressing God’s concern for the well being of the individual needing the miracle.
False worship, vv. 11-18. The audience response to the miracle centers on a shocking misunderstanding
by the crowds of what had happened (vv. 11-13) and the two missionaries’ desperate attempts to correct the
misunderstanding (vv. 14-18).
Misunderstanding, vv. 11-13: 11 οἵ τε ὄχλοι ἰδόντες ὃ ἐποίησεν Παῦλος ἐπῆραν
τὴν φωνὴν αὐτῶν Λυκαονιστὶ λέγοντες· Οἱ θεοὶ ὁμοιωθέντες ἀνθρώποις κατέβησαν
πρὸς ἡμᾶς 12 ἐκάλουν τε τὸν Βαρναβᾶν Δία, τὸν δὲ Παῦλον Ἑρμῆν, ἐπειδὴ αὐτὸς ἦν
ὁ ἡγούμενος τοῦ λόγου. 13 ὅ τε ἱερεὺς τοῦ Διὸς τοῦ ὄντος πρὸ τῆς πόλεως ταύρους καὶ
στέμματα ἐπὶ τοὺς πυλῶνας ἐνέγκας σὺν τοῖς ὄχλοις ἤθελεν θύειν. 11 When the crowds
saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down
to us in human form!” 12 Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he
was the chief speaker. 13 The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen
and garlands to the gates; he and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice. The misunderstanding
was that the crowds assumed that this miracle meant that some gods had descended to
earth to be with them. The confusion of the crowd is further heightened by the way they
interpreted the healing. 145 How they could have identified the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes with Barnabas and
142 “ἅλλομαι fut. ἁλούμαι, 1 aor. ἡλάμην (Hom. et al.; LXX; Jos., Bell. 5, 330, Ant. 20, 61; Just., D. 69, 6 [s. Is 35:6]).
1. lit. to make a quick leaping movement, leap, spring up (PRyl 138, 15): of the lame man when healed (Is 35:6) περιπατῶν καὶ
ἁλλόμενος walking and leaping i.e. showing by slow and fast movement that he was really healed Ac 3:8. ἥλατο καὶ περιεπάτει he
leaped up and could walk 14:10.
2. fig., of the quick movement of inanimate things (since Il. 4, 125 an arrow): to spring up from a source, of water well up, bubble
up (as Lat. salire Vergil, Ecl. 5, 47; Suet., Octav. 82) πηγὴ ὕδατος ἁλλομένου a spring of water welling up J 4:14.—DELG. M-M.
[William Arndt, Frederick W. Danker and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian
Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 46.]
143The standard pattern of miracle narratives universally in the ancient world included three segments: 1) description of the need for
the miracle (i.e., vv. 8-9a); 2) description of the doing of the miracle (i.e., vv. 9b-10a); and 3) the consequences of the miracle first on the
person or object targeted by the miracle (i.e., v. 10b) and then on the bystanders who watched the miracle being done (i.e., vv. 11-18).
144 “In its present form, the healing is too similar to that of Peter (and John) in 3:1–10 for the resemblance to be attributed to accident
or to the requirements of the form. 31 The phrases καί τις ἀνήρ (‘and a man’) and χωλὸς ἐκ κοιλίας μητρὸς αὑτοῦ (‘crippled from birth’)
occur only in these two places in the Greek Bible. 32 The two accounts also share the words ἰδών (‘seeing’), περιεπάτει (‘walk’ [imperative]),
and forms of the verbs ἀτενίζω (‘look intently’) and ἅλλομαι (‘leap’), the last of which appears only once elsewhere in the NT.
In addition, each involves a temple, an entrance, 33 and contains a subsequent religious conflict and a speech that explains the source of
miraculous power. Luke has so shaped this incident to provide a comparison and contrast between the ministries of Peter and Paul and
the evangelization of a polytheist audience that the discovery of an underlying source of the miracle is not only impossible but also irrelevant.
When the two stories are placed beside one another, an action the implied reader is all but compelled to perform, Gal 2:9 emerges
as a memorable diptych: Peter, missionary to the Jews (who inaugurated the gentile mission), and Paul, herald of salvation to the gentiles
(to whom he preaches a basic tenet of Jewish monotheism). 34 ” [Richard I. Pervo and Harold W. Attridge, Acts : A Commentary on the
Book of Acts, Hermeneia--a critical and historical commentary on the Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009), 352.]
145 “In a Jewish context, the healing would move a crowd to praise God. So here, but these acclaimers are not Jews, so they leap to the
conclusion that gods are on the scene. That scene is as full of problems as it is of excitement. From the history-of-religions perspective,
deification is an overdetermined reaction, 44 and no allowance for miscommunication readily compensates for the confusion of heralds