Acts 21:5

And when it came to pass that we had accomplished the days, we departed and went on our journey; and they all, with wives and children, brought us on our way until we were out of the city: and kneeling down on the beach, we prayed, and bade each other farewell; and we went on board the ship, but they returned home again.

Barnes viewed this episode as proof that New Testament Christians did not follow any prescribed form of prayer, but that prayers were offered extemporaneously at any convenient time or place. He said:

No man can read this narrative in a dispassionate manner without believing that they offered an extemporaneous prayer .... No man can believe that Paul thus poured out the emotions of his heart in a prescribed form of words.[13]

But they returned home again ... There is the suppressed longing of the heart for home in Luke's words here. He, with Paul and their fellow-travelers, went aboard ship; but THEY went home. What a poignant word is they. They went home with wife and child; but Luke and Paul went to the savage mob in Jerusalem, and chains, and long waiting for justice that never came, and at last a voyage that led to a shipwreck on Malta, and the military barracks in Rome. As De Welt said, "I can read into the closing words of Luke a certain loneliness that he must have felt ... `But they returned HOME again.'"[14]

[13] Albert Barnes, op. cit., p. 303.

[14] Don DeWelt, Acts Made Actual (Joplin, Missouri: College Press, 1958), p. 278.