Acts 18:24 — Apollos Arrives

Between Paul's first visit and his great return, Luke gives Ephesus a delicious interlude: the arrival of Apollos. Alexandrian, learned, "fervent in the spirit" and magnificent in the pulpit — yet his gospel stopped short, "knowing only the baptism of John" (Acts 18:25). What happens next made Ephesus the model for every church that has ever corrected a gifted man kindly.

The gentlest correction in Scripture

Aquila and Priscilla hear him in the synagogue, and instead of a public rebuttal, "they took him unto them" — a private home, a shared table — "and expounded unto him the way of God more perfectly" (Acts 18:26). Apollos receives it with the humility of the truly great, sails for Corinth with the church's blessing, and there "mightily convinced the Jews... shewing by the scriptures that Jesus was Christ" (18:28). In time Paul would rank him alongside himself and Peter (1 Corinthians 1:12) — an Ephesian graduation if ever there was one.

Standing in the verse

Apollos's Ephesus was the synagogue and a believing household — the two rooms of the earliest church here. On our tours the Library of Celsus makes the natural pause for his story: a monument to eloquence and learning in the very city where the most eloquent man of the apostolic age learned the one thing he lacked.