{"author":null,"canonical_references":[],"database_sha256":"8cfbe7284c6936871d57c02dc6aa63ebbdfd4722422d539dd9f716e46e91112e","date_end":null,"date_start":null,"edition_year":null,"id":"sermonindex-ecf-2777","native_reference":{"book_number":510,"chapter_from":19,"chapter_to":19,"system":"MyBible module coordinates (mapping unverified)","verse_from":19,"verse_to":19},"public_import_allowed":false,"record_kind":"verse-keyed-module-record","review_required":["English edition and exact text","author/work attribution","dating","verse mapping and citation kind","reuse and attribution","split author quotations and deduplicate"],"review_status":"unreviewed","source_html":"<p><b>Ammonius of Alexandria</b>: Every sinner must confess his sins and, through his self-conviction, turn away from continuing to commit them, so that he may become just according to the passage, \"Confess your sins first so that you may be justified,\" and the passage, \"Just is the man who accuses himself.\" The idolaters and magicians were so many in Ephesus that they prepared magicians' books at a high price, as if these books held the most noble things in life. Upon believing in Christ, they did not sell them, even though there were many who wanted to obtain them, but they burned them. And they did this first so that no one could take part in their soul-destroying ruin, and second so that they could have no profit from it. For just as it is forbidden to offer to God the value of a dog or profit from impurity, so also did they judge it an injustice to lay at the apostles' feet money from such a source.<br/><i>— CATENA ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 19.18</i></p><p><b>Bede</b>: And many of those who had followed curious arts brought their books, etc. He calls curious arts the industry of magical arts, whose followers justly burn their books, valued at a great price, when they see the very demons they served honoring Jesus Christ the Lord and his apostles.<br/><i>— Commentary on Acts</i></p><p><b>Bede</b>: They found the sum to be fifty thousand silver coins. And in the Gospel's debtors under the number of fifty denarii, debts are forgiven. I believe that subsisting in this life with the five senses of the body, we transgress the precepts of the Decalogue. Here, however, due to the enormity of the magic crime, the number of a thousand is also added. Otherwise, the number fifty often refers to penance and the remission of sins, whence the Fiftieth Psalm of Penance, and the fiftieth year is one of remission.<br/><i>— Commentary on Acts</i></p><p><b>Didymus the Blind</b>: Let those who accuse Christ's disciples of being magicians be refuted by this reading, since it shows clearly that all magic is destroyed by the power of their teaching. See these people, not being incompetent but having great ability in this art, after being purified of the magical arts or of their customary demons, how they gathered together all the books of magic and burned them before all present at that time, even though they were of great value.<br/><i>— CATENA ON THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES 19.19-20</i></p><p><b>Eusebius of Caesarea</b>: It shows what our Savior's disciples were; it shows the extraordinary influence of their words when they addressed their audience, that people so touched the depths of their souls, caught hold of and pierced the individual conscience, that men no longer hid anything away in concealment but brought forth their forbidden things to light and themselves completed the indictment of themselves and their own former wickedness. It shows what their pupils were like, how pure and honorable in disposition, determined that nothing evil in them should lurk below the surface, and how boldly they prided themselves on their change from the worse to the better. Yes, they who gave their magic books to the flames and voted for their complete destruction left no one in any doubt that they would never again have anything to do with sorcery, and from that day forth they were pure from the slightest suspicion of it.<br/><i>— PROOF OF THE GOSPEL 3.6</i></p><p><b>John Chrysostom</b>: \"And many of them that practised curious arts, brought their books together, and burnt them in the presence of all men\" - having seen that there was no more use of them now that the demons themselves do these things - \"and reckoned up the price of them, and found the amount fifty thousand pieces of silver. So mightily grew the word of God and prevailed.\" And so he disputed in the school of one Tyrannus for two years: where were believers, and believers exceedingly advanced in the faith. Moreover Paul writes to them as to great men. Ephesus was famous for its sorcerers and magicians. The \"curious arts\" were arts connected with this sorcery and the books burned contained mysterious sentences and symbols which gave to them an extravagant worth in the eyes of the superstitious.<br/><i>— Homily on Acts 41</i></p><p><b>Tertullian</b>: For when to an age much more ignorant (than ours) they had disclosed certain well-concealed material substances, and several not well-revealed scientific arts-if it is true that they had laid bare the operations of metallurgy, and had divulged the natural properties of herbs, and had promulgated the powers of enchantments, and had traced out every curious art, even to the interpretation of the stars-they conferred properly and as it were peculiarly upon women that instrumental mean of womanly ostentation, the radiances of jewels wherewith necklaces are variegated, and the circlets of gold wherewith the arms are compressed, and the medicaments of orchil with which wools are coloured, and that black powder itself wherewith the eyelids and eyelashes are made prominent.<br/><i>— On the Apparel of Women Book I</i></p>","source_html_sha256":"fe9b1c1065afc44fb86a1fb2a33a4641e8c8c2faeab1cf8ca5194aa5197f36b0","source_module":"ECF","source_row_id":2777,"source_url":"https://www.sermonindex.net/commentary/ecf/","text_sha256":"b6ad115f1ce29bf86ca36fb14b0cb154cd5ea80352d0f6938bbd1dbc32c3f1a8","translator":null,"work":null}