The Jews stirred up the devout and honourable women. — The fact stated brings before us another feature of the relations between Jews and Gentiles at this period. They “compassed sea and land to make one proselyte” (Matthew 23:15). They found it easier to make proselytes of women. Such conversions had their good and their bad sides. In many cases there was a real longing for a higher and purer life than was found in the infinite debasement of Greek and Roman society, which found its satisfaction in the life and faith of Israel. (See Notes on Acts 17:4; Acts 17:12.) But with many, such as Juvenal speaks of when he describes (Sat. vi. 542) the Jewish teacher who gains influence over women —
“Arcanam Judæa tremens mendicat in aurem
Interpres legum Solymarum” —
[“The trembling Jewess whispers in her ear,
And tells her of the laws of Solymse,”][3][3] Solymæ, of course, stands for Jerusalem.
the change brought with it new elements of superstition and weakness, and absolute submission of conscience to its new directors, and thus the Rabbis were often to the wealthier women of Greek and Roman cities what Jesuit confessors were in France and Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Here we get the darker side of the picture. The Jews stir up the women of the upper class, and they stir up their husbands. The latter were content apparently to acquiesce in their wives accepting the Judaism with which they had become familiar, but resented the intrusion of a new and, in one sense, more exacting doctrine.
Raised persecution against Paul and Barnabas. — It lies in the nature of the case that they were not the only sufferers. From the first the Christians of Antioch in Pisidia had to learn the lesson that they must “through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22). The memory of these sufferings came back upon St. Paul’s mind, even in the last months of his life, as something never to be forgotten (2 Timothy 3:11).