Acts 19:28-41

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.”

⁴¹Then the town clerk told the mob, “You can all go home now.” And they all went away from that sports oval.