J. W. McGarvey on the Elders in Acts 14:23

Acts chapters 13 and 14 narrate what is often called Paul's First Missionary Journey. In this story, the Apostle is accompanied another great New Testament character, Barnabas. For a time, a relative of Barnabas, John, was with them (13:5 and 13).

The missionaries traveled from their home church in Syrian Antioch (modern Antakya, Turkey) to the island of Cyprus. From there, they sailed to south-central Anatolia where they taught many people about what God had recently done through Jesus of Nazareth.

Once they started back home, Paul and Barnabas retraced their steps and visited many of the newly-formed congregations of those who believed in Jesus. As they did so, they "appointed elders for them in each church and, with prayer and fasting, committed them to the Lord, in whom they had put their trust" (14:23). But, someone might ask, if according to 1 Timothy 3:6, an elder "must not be a recent convert," how does that square with the appointment of new Christians to this role in Acts 14:23?

Back in the nineteenth century, this question had occurred to J. W. McGarvey (pictured here) one of the best biblical scholars the Disciples movement ever produced. In commenting on Acts 14:23, McGarvey wrote:

If anyone is surprised that men were found in these newly founded congregations possessed of the high qualifications for the office laid down by Paul in his epistles to Titus and Timothy, he should remember that although these disciples had been but a comparatively short time in the church, may of them were, in character and knowledge of the Scriptures, the ripest fruits of the Jewish synagogue; and they needed only additional knowledge which the gospel brought, in order to be models of wisdom and piety for the churches. They were not "novices" (I Tim. III. 6) in the sense of being newly turned away from wickedness. [1]

Here we see deep understanding, an appreciation for ancient Judaism as the primary matrix from which earliest Christian grew. McGarvey's knowledge and good judgment shine through in this and so many other sections of his classic commentary.

Note

[1] J. W. McGarvey, New Commentary on Acts of Apostles (Cincinnati: Standard Publishing Company, 1892), vol. 2: pages 50-51.

Below is a link to an online copy of volume 2 of McGarvey's commentary, the one quoted in this post:

https://archive.org/details/newcommentaryona02mcga/page/50/mode/2up

Meta Chestnutt Sager's Letter to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945 (7)

Sager critiques the practice of baptism by sprinkling or pouring, and advances baptism strictly by immersion, along several different lines. Specifically, she appeals to the New Testament phrase "one baptism," to church history, Greek philology, and the particulars of the setting in Acts 8:26-39, which tells the story of Philip's baptizing the eunuch from Africa. Using the language of Paul's Letter to the Ephesians 4:5, she writes: "the Church of Christ, the Kingdom of heaven on earth, has one Lord, one faith, one baptism." She adds that the "one baptism"--which she takes to as a reference to only one form of baptism--"was practiced until about three hundred years after Christ when the Catholic Church was formally established; and the one baptism was practiced by all Catholics until for convenience the Pope decreed the change to sprinkling. . . . Ask any priest and he will admit that immersion was the original form." There is no evidence that Sager ever studied Greek, the language of the New Testament. But she is able to cite what she regards as a personal authority: "I asked a Greek from Greece what they understood by baptize and he said no Greek understood anything else but to immerse." Finally, much like a good defense attorney, Sager preempts the suggestion that because the baptism of the eunuch took place in the "desert" (Acts 8:26), he could not have been immersed: "I know some try to say there was no water at that place in the desert, but it is a known fact from history that at that particular place and particular time of the year there was a pool of abundant water. No informed person will risk his scholarship in denying the fact."[1] Here, Sager is in all likelihood relying on her memory of having read J. W. McGarvey's commentary on Acts, or her memory of sermons by men like David Lipscomb and T. B. Larimore. Perhaps she had even heard McGarvey himself, who wrote:

The term desert is not here to be understood in its stricter sense of a barren waste, but in its more general acceptation, of a place thinly inhabited. Such an interpretation is required by the geography of the country.  . . . The only road from Jerusalem to Gaza, which passed through a level district suitable for wheeled vehicles, was that by Bethlehem to Hebron, and thence across a plain to Gaza. According to Dr. Hackett, this is "the desert" of Luke i: 80, in which John the Immerser grew up. Dr. S.[sic] T. Barclay, who traversed this entire route in May, 1853, says that he traveled, after leaving "the immediate vicinity of Hebron, over one of the very best roads (with slight exceptions) and one of the most fertile countries that I ever beheld."[2]

Notes

[1] Meta Chestnutt Sager to Eva Heiliger, February 11, 1945.

[2] J. W. McGarvey, A Commentary on Acts of the Apostles, 7th ed. (Lexington, KY: Transylvania Printing and Publishing Company, 1872), 95-96. The Barclay to whom McGarvey refers was J. T. Barclay, who became the first international missionary of the Stone-Campbell Movement when in 1850 he traveled to Jerusalem to launch a mission to Jews who lived there. See Paul M. Blowers, "Barclay, James Turner (1807-1874)," in Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 69-70.