Acts 18:4Plain English VersionEvery Saturday the Jews in Corinth met together in the Jewish meeting house there. Paul met with them there too. He talked a lot with those Jewish people, and he talked to the Greek people there too. He tried to get them to believe in Jesus. See the chapter |
The same thing happened in the town called Iconium. Paul and Barnabas went to the Jewish meeting house, and they talked strongly about Jesus to the people there. They told them that God is very good to people. And a big mob of people believed in Jesus. Some of them were Jews, and some of them were not Jews. But there were other Jewish people that didn’t believe in Jesus, and they talked to the other people that were not Jews, and they got them to hate the Christians. So the people of Iconium split up into 2 mobs. One mob reckoned that Paul and Barnabas were right, but the other mob reckoned those Jewish people were right. Paul and Barnabas stayed in Iconium a long time, and they kept on telling people about Jesus, and they were not frightened of anyone. And God helped Paul and Barnabas do powerful things, to show that they were telling the true story about Jesus.
So he went to the Jewish meeting house a lot, and he talked with the people there about Jesus. Some of those people were Jews, and some of them were Greeks that believed in God. And every day Paul went to the place in the middle of the city, where there were a lot of people, and he talked about Jesus to the people that he met there.
That ship stopped half-way, at a town called Ephesus. They got off that ship there, and Paul went into the Jewish meeting house in Ephesus, and he talked to the Jewish people there. They asked him to stay there longer, but he said, “No, sorry, I’ve got to say goodbye and keep going. But if God wants me to come back here one day, I will come back.” Then he got on a ship to go to Syria country, and he sailed away from Ephesus. But Priscilla and Aquila stayed there.
But that man, Paul, he talks to big mobs of people, and he says, ‘Don’t buy those things. Those statues that people say are gods, they are not gods at all. It was people that made them, so don’t show respect to them.’ Lots of people here in Ephesus listened to him, and now even the people from other towns in this Asia country agree with him, and they don’t want to buy the things we make.
Then they talked together and agreed to come back on another day to hear Paul. When that day came, a lot of Jews came to Paul’s house. He started talking with them in the morning, and he kept going all day, until the sun went down. He told them about how God wants to bring people into his family, and he tried to get them to understand that Jesus is the man that God sent to save people. He showed them what God’s book says. He talked to them about the words that Moses wrote in God’s book, and also the words that God’s other men wrote in his book. He showed them that God’s men all told messages about Jesus.