Acts 8:26-40

“See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” (Acts 8:36)

If these stories of Philip belong in the sequence and close connection in which we now have them, then either he returned with the apostles to Jerusalem and from there set out for Gaza, or Peter and John returned without him and he traveled directly from Samaria. The Greek favors the first, in that Philip’s instruction was to go “on” the road, not to the road as in NIV; and the road to Gaza ran from Jerusalem. There were, in fact, two roads—the more northerly, which went first to Ashkelon and then by the coast, and the other, which went by way of Hebron and then westward through the desert. It may have been to this that Luke was referring when he added, “This is a desert,” rather than to its disuse. Or it may have been to Gaza itself (the Greek is ambiguous), for the old city had been destroyed and its site remained largely “a desert” (so Strabo described it, Geography 16.2.30; cf. Zeph. 2:4).

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