Acts 19:2-26

²“Did you, when you became believers in Christ, receive the Holy Spirit?” “No,” they answered, “we did not even hear that there was a Holy Spirit.”

³“What then was your baptism?” Paul asked.

⁴“John's baptism was a baptism on repentance,” rejoined Paul, “and John told the people (speaking of the ‘one coming’ after him) that they should believe in him — that is in Jesus.”

⁵On hearing this, they were baptised into the faith of the Lord Jesus,

⁶and, after Paul had placed his hands on them, the Holy Spirit descended on them, and they began to speak in other languages and to preach.

⁷There were about twelve of them in all.

⁸Paul went to the synagogue there, and for three months spoke out fearlessly, giving addresses and trying to convince his hearers, about the kingdom of God.

⁹Some of them, however, hardened their hearts and refused to believe, denouncing the Way before the people. So Paul left them and withdrew his disciples, and gave daily addresses in the lecture-hall of Tyrannus.

¹⁰This went on for two years, so that all who lived in Roman Asia, Jews and Greeks alike, heard the Lord's message.

¹¹God did miracles of no ordinary kind by Paul's hands;

¹²so that people would carry home to the sick handkerchiefs or aprons that had touched his body, and their diseases would leave them and the wicked spirits go out of them.

¹³An attempt was made by some itinerant Jews, who were exorcists, to use the name of the Lord Jesus over those who had wicked spirits in them. “I order you,” they would say, “by the Jesus, whom Paul preaches.”

¹⁴The seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this;

¹⁵but the wicked spirit answered them, “Jesus I acknowledge, and Paul I know, but you — who are you?”

¹⁶Then the man, in whom this wicked spirit was, sprang on them, mastered both of them, and so completely overpowered them, that they fled out of the house, stripped of their clothes, and wounded.

¹⁷This incident came to the knowledge of all the Jews and Greeks living at Ephesus; they were all awe-struck, and the name of the Lord Jesus was held in the highest honour.

¹⁸Many, too, of those who had become believers in Christ came with a full confession of their practices;

¹⁹while a number of people, who had practised magic, collected their books and burnt them publicly; and on reckoning up the price of these, they found it amounted to fifty thousand silver coins.

²⁰So irresistibly did the Lord's message spread and prevail.

²¹Sometime after these events Paul resolved to go through Macedonia and Greece, and then make his way to Jerusalem. “And after I have been there,” he said, “I must visit Rome also.”

²²So he sent to Macedonia two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, while he himself stayed for some time longer in Roman Asia.

²³Just about that time a great disturbance arose about the Way.

²⁴A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver models of the shrine of Artemis, and so gave a great deal of work to the artisans,

²⁵got these men together, as well as the workmen engaged in similar occupations, and said: “Men, you know that our prosperity depends on this work,

²⁶and you see and hear that not only at Ephesus, but in almost the whole of Roman Asia, this Paul has convinced and won over great numbers of people, by his assertion that those Gods which are made by hands are not Gods at all.