Acts 19:23-31

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.”