And
when her masters saw that the hope of their gains was gone, they caught
Paul and Silas, and drew [them] into the marketplace unto the rulers
//If you've read the books of Acts cover-to-cover, you know it contains
some mighty hard-to-believe stories. This tends to hurt the book's
credibility in the eyes of many scholars. But there is a fascinating
turning point in Acts, where scholars suddenly perk up.
Today's
verse is a pivot point in Acts; a point where the pronoun "they"
changes suddenly to "we," and remains "we" for quite some time. You
probably won't notice this in your chosen version, because care is taken
by most interpreters to make the story read cohesively. See the word
[them], bracketed purposefully by the online Blue Letter Bible I copied
from? It isn't really there, not in the original Greek. Instead, the
text suddenly switches from third-person to first-person. It is as if
the author of Acts lifted a story, presumably written by Paul himself,
and placed it within his own narrative. These portions describe the
exploits and journeys of Paul, and coincide well with authentic Pauline
writings elsewhere in the Bible. This change to a personal pronoun
increases scholars' confidence in at least this portion of the book of
Acts.
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