Acts 8:35

Note

On a desert road, in a chariot, an Ethiopian official is reading Isaiah and cannot tell whom the prophet means. This verse is Philip's answer.

An angel of the Lord had sent Philip to "the desert road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza" (Acts 8:26). There he met a eunuch, the treasurer of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, returning from worship in Jerusalem. The man was reading Isaiah 53: "He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is silent, so He did not open His mouth" (Acts 8:32). Asked whether he understood it, he answered, "How can I … unless someone guides me?" (Acts 8:31), and then put the question every reader of that chapter must face: "who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?" (Acts 8:34).

The verb is euangelizomai (εὐαγγελίζομαι) in the aorist, euēngelisato, with two objects: autō, "to him," and ton Iēsoun, "Jesus." Word for word, "he gospelled Jesus to him." The content of the good news is not an idea or a rule but a person. Where the BSB says "began," the Greek first says that Philip opened his mouth, a biblical way of marking a weighty speech; Peter opens his mouth in the same way at the house of Cornelius (Acts 10:34). And "began" (arxamenos) recalls the road to Emmaus, where the risen Jesus explained what was written about Himself, "beginning with Moses and all the Prophets" (Luke 24:27). Luke uses the same participle for Philip. He does what his Lord did: he starts from the Scriptures and arrives at Jesus.

The KJV keeps the Greek shape: "and preached unto him Jesus." The BSB unfolds the verb into "told him the good news about Jesus," and the LSV writes "proclaimed good news to him—Jesus." Between them they say both halves of the truth: the message was a person, and that person was good news. In the KJV the eunuch then confesses, "I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God" (verse 37); the BSB, like most modern versions, leaves that verse out, since the oldest manuscripts do not have it.

Matthew Henry turns the scene into counsel for every reader of Scripture: "In reading the word of God, we should often pause, to inquire of whom and of what the sacred writers spake; but especially our thoughts should be employed about the Redeemer" Matthew Henry. Wesley takes the line the eunuch had just read, "Who can recount His descendants?" (Acts 8:33), as a question about the Servant's offspring: "who can number his seed … which he hath purchased by laying down his life?" Wesley. If the Servant led to the slaughter has descendants beyond counting, the man in the chariot is one of them.

Irenaeus, writing around 180 (Against Heresies 3.12.8), records that this eunuch was sent on into the regions of Ethiopia to preach what he himself had believed: one God, proclaimed by the prophets, whose Son had already appeared as a man and been led as a sheep to the slaughter Irenaeus, Against Heresies. The church remembered the gospel heard on that road as travelling much farther south.

The eunuch admitted that he held the Scriptures and could not understand them. The gospel began exactly there, at the verse he was reading. Anyone who opens the Bible and asks whom it is about is given the same answer that was given on that road: Jesus.