Font Size
Acts 14:6-8
New Catholic Bible
Acts 14:6-8
New Catholic Bible
6 When they became aware of this, they fled to the Lycaonian cities[a] of Lystra and Derbe and to the surrounding area. 7 There they preached the good news.
At Lystra Paul and Barnabas Are Taken for Gods.[b] 8 At Lystra, there was a man who was crippled. Lame from birth, he had never once been able to walk.
Read full chapterFootnotes
- Acts 14:6 Lycaonian cities: Lycaonia was a district east of Pisidia, north of the Taurus Mountains, and part of the Roman province of Galatia. Lystra: a Roman colony about 20 miles from Iconium and 130 miles from Antioch. Derbe: a town about 60 miles from Lystra.
- Acts 14:8 A new problem arises for the Church: the kind of reaction shown here by a crowd of rural Gentiles, who regard the two apostles as divinities. Peter had already raised up Cornelius when the latter knelt before him (Acts 10:25). The sermon here, the first one on the Gospel to Gentiles, is a fragment. It is to be completed in light of the more fully developed discourse in Acts 17:22-31.
When addressed to Gentiles, the kerygma was profoundly different than when addressed to Jews. It urged the abandonment of dead idols in order to turn to the living God. Proofs were not taken from Scripture; rather the emphasis was on God manifesting himself to all human beings through the cycles of life and of the world.
