This thou knowest, that all they which are in Asia be turned away from me. — This sad desertion of friends is well known to thee. Instead of being dispirited by it, and by my arrest and close imprisonment, rather shouldest thou be stimulated to fresh and renewed exertions for the cause for which I suffer this desertion, these bonds.
All they which are in Asia. — It has been maintained by many, even by great Greek expositors such as Chrysostom, that “they which are in Asia” refers to certain Asiatic Christians who happened to be in Rome at the time of the Apostle’s arrest and imprisonment. Others have even suggested that these Asiatics had gone to Rome for the purpose of bearing witness in St. Paul’s favour, and finding that St. Paul’s position was one of extreme danger, terrified for themselves — like others once before had been in the Christian story — lest they too should be involved in a like condemnation, forsook him and fled. But the simple and more obvious meaning is here to be preferred, and we assume as certain that the forsaking, the giving up St. Paul, took place in Asia itself. Large numbers of Christians, if not whole churches, repudiated their connection with the great father of Gentile Christianity, and possibly disobeyed some of his teaching. What, in fact, absolutely took place in Asia while St. Paul lay bound, waiting for death in Rome, had been often threatened in Corinth and in other centres. Party feeling ran high in those days, we know; and one of the most sorrowful trials the great-hearted St. Paul had to endure in the agony of his last witnessing for his Lord, was the knowledge that his name and teaching no longer was held in honour in some of those Asian churches so dear to him. The geographical term Asia is rather vague. It may — and indeed, strictly speaking, does — include Mysia, Phrygia, Lydia, Caria; but such a wide-spread defection from Pauline teaching seems improbable, and there is no tradition that anything of the kind ever took place. St. Paul probably wrote the term more in the old Homeric sense, and meant the district in the neighbourhood of the river Cayster;
“In Asian meadow by Cayster’s streams.”
— Iliad ii. 461.
Of whom are Phygellus and Hermogenes. — These names would at once suggest to Timothy the men and the congregations of “Asia” to whom St. Paul was alluding — names well known, doubtless, then, and especially to persons in the position of Timothy; but no tradition has been preserved which throws any light on the lives and actions of these traitorous friends of St. Paul.