Acts 13:13

3. Paul and Barnabas at Pisidian Antioch Address and Results , Acts 13:14-43 .

13. Paul and his company At once Luke uses language which implies that Paul has become chief, and the rest, including Barnabas, are sunk to the position of subordinates. The Greek phrase is literally, those about Paul, an idiom frequently used in Greek. Those about Proserpine (Thucydides) means Proserpine and her attendant maidens. Those about Socrates means Socrates and his scholars. Those about Xenophon means Xenophon and his soldiers. Those about Paul must mean Paul and his retinue. Of this change of Paul’s position, the change of his name, when the Holy Ghost empowered him to rebuke Elymas with anathema and blindness, is the palpable crisis. He was an apostle elect when first called by Jesus: he rose to the fulness of his apostolic power and position when then filled with the Holy Ghost.

Loosed Set sail. The only marked success which Luke mentions in their entire tour through Cyprus is the conversion of the proconsul. Why their movements were so rapid and their stop at each place so brief, we are unable to conjecture; but the whole life of Paul was of that same arduous and rapid strain. He was one of those rare mortals who seem so charged with an intensity of nature that rest is impossible, and they are impelled by the sense that their mission requires the utmost tension of nerve, through every instant, for its fulfilment. What rebukes are the lives of such men, when devoted to the sublimest of all ideas, to the levity of the vast numbers who make our solemn life an easy time, a play-spell, a series of trifles!

Came… Pamphylia Trace their course from Paphos, cutting the Mediterranean with their keel, in what would now be considered a light row-boat with sail superadded, in a slant line northwest-ward into the gulf, and up to the continental shore of Pamphylia in Asia Minor. Very probably the reason why Paul chose this missionary field was because Pamphylia bordered on his native Cilicia. as Cyprus was the native home of Barnabas, and as he had already, while residing at Tarsus, planted Churches in Cilicia, he had reasons for believing that he could extend the work into Pamphylia. Dwellers in Pamphylia (Acts 2:10) had shared the pentecostal outpouring, and had carried, probably, an ardent but not fully instructed Christianity into that province. Yet it needed an apostle to found Christianity amid the wild population of Pamphylia.

John (See note on Acts 13:5 and Acts 12:12.) Their young servitor, Mark, may with unquestionable truth be said to have deserted them and the work. Nobly did the young minister, however, subsequently redeem his reputation, regain the high regards of Paul, and record a Gospel of Jesus, which, though said to be drawn from the narrations of Peter, possesses much of the nerve and fire of the mighty Paul. The obvious conclusion is, that the highlands of Pamphylia, familiar as they were to Cilician Paul, loomed so darkly before the inexperienced eye of Mark that he longed for his quiet Jerusalem home and returned. For it was amid the fastnesses of Pamphylia and Pisidia that Paul encountered his “perils by robbers” and “perils by rivers.” The very name, Pamphylia, signifies All-tribes-land, from its heterogeneous races and dialects. Here was the meeting of the oriental and occidental populations, Greek predominating in numbers, Latin in power, underlaid with intermingled Phenicians, Syrians, and Jews. Robber chiefs often held the fastnesses, and even Alexander the Great encountered some of the worst dangers of his wars in passing from Perga to Phrygia.