Acts 19:18-40

¹⁸At that time, some of the Christians in Ephesus were still doing bad things, and some of them used to sing people and curse people. They had a lot of books that showed them the way to do that bad magic. Those Christians heard about those 7 men, and then they said they were sorry for the bad things that they were doing, and they gathered up all of those books and burned them. Everybody saw them burn those books. Those books about magic cost a lot of money. They reckoned all of those books together cost about 5 million dollars.

²⁰That is the way the message about Jesus got very powerful, and a lot of people heard that message.

²¹After those things happened, Paul wanted to visit the Christians in Macedonia country and Achaia country again, and after that he wanted to go on to Jerusalem. And he said, “After I go to Jerusalem, I have to go to Rome too.”

²²He sent his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, ahead of him to Macedonia country. But Paul stayed a little while longer in Asia country.

²³Soon after that, some of the people in Ephesus tried to make a lot of trouble for the Christians, that people called the Jesus Way mob.

²⁴There was a man there called Demetrius. His job was making little statues out of silver. They were models of the special house of a woman god called Artemis. There were other men too that made those little statues. They sold them to people that respected Artemis, and they got a lot of money from that business.

²⁵Demetrius called a meeting of his workers and other men that made things for that god Artemis. Demetrius said to them, “Men, you know that we make these statues and sell them for a lot of money.

²⁶But that man Paul tells big mobs of people, ‘Don’t buy those statues. They are not gods at all.’ He talks like that here in Ephesus, and now even the people from other towns in this Asia country don’t want to buy the things we make. Paul tells people that these statues we make are not gods, and people shouldn’t show respect to them.

²⁷If people keep listening to him, we’ll soon go broke. And not only that, but people will reckon they don’t have to come to the special house of Artemis to show respect to her. People all over our Asia country and everywhere show respect to our great woman god Artemis, but soon people might not think that Artemis is great.”

²⁸All the men there heard Demetrius say that, and then they were very angry with Paul. They started to shout, “Artemis is very great. She is the god of us Ephesus mob.”

²⁹A lot of the other people in the town heard them shouting and they went and joined those men and started shouting too. They got angry with Paul, and they grabbed the 2 men from Macedonia that used to go around with Paul. Their names were Gaius and Aristarchus. They dragged those 2 men to the sports oval of that town.

³⁰Paul wanted to go there too, to talk to the people, but the other Christians wouldn’t let him do that.

³¹There were some government officials of that country that were friends of Paul. They heard that those people went wild, so they sent him a message to tell him strongly, “Don’t go to that sports oval. It’s too dangerous. They might kill you.”

³²That big mob of people were a bit mixed up. Some of them shouted one thing, and some of them shouted something else. But most of them didn’t even know what the meeting was about.

³³One of the Jews there was called Alexander. Some people there pushed him to the front so that he could talk to the crowd of people. So Alexander held up his hand, to get the mob to be quiet.

³⁴But some people knew that Alexander was a Jew, and that the Jews didn’t show respect to Artemis, so they shouted, “Artemis is very great. She is the god of us Ephesus mob.” Then the whole mob kept on shouting like that for about 2 hours.

³⁵Then the town clerk got the mob to stop shouting, and he said to them, “Listen, Ephesus people, everyone knows that we Ephesus people look after the special house for Artemis, the great woman god. And everyone knows that we look after the statue of her that fell down from the sky.

³⁶Nobody can say that these things are not true. So you have to be quiet now. Don’t do anything that will make trouble for us.

³⁷Why did you bring these 2 men here? They didn’t do anything bad. They didn’t go into the special houses for our gods and take things from there. And they didn’t say anything bad about our woman god.

³⁸If Demetrius and his mates want to blame anyone about anything bad, they have to do it the right way. They have to go to the judges in the courts. If anybody wants to blame somebody else, those judges are ready to listen. That’s their job.

³⁹Or if anybody wants to complain about something else, there are other government bosses that can meet together and think about their problem.

⁴⁰You see, you mob now are not a proper meeting, and if the big Roman bosses hear about all this trouble, they might say that we Ephesus people are trying to start a fight against the Roman government. If they ask me about all this trouble, I will not know what to tell them.”