Acts 16
The full text of Acts 16 in the Trinity Bible Version — clear modern English, translated from the original Greek. Free to read.
1 Paul came to Derbe and then to Lystra, where a disciple named Timothy lived. His mother was a believing Jewish woman, but his father was Greek.
2 The believers in Lystra and Iconium spoke well of him.
3 Paul wanted to take him along on the journey, so he circumcised him because of the Jews who lived in that area, for they all knew that his father was Greek.
4 As they traveled from town to town, they handed on the decisions reached by the apostles and elders in Jerusalem for the people to obey.
5 So the churches were strengthened in the faith and grew in numbers every day.
6 Paul and his companions traveled through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from speaking the word in the province of Asia.
7 When they came up to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them.
8 So they passed by Mysia and went down to Troas.
9 During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and pleading with him, "Come over to Macedonia and help us."
10 After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the good news to them.
11 From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day on to Neapolis.
12 From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and a leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days.
13 On the Sabbath day we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there.
14 One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth who worshiped God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul's message.
15 When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. "If you consider me a believer in the Lord," she said, "come and stay at my house." And she persuaded us.
16 Once, as we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling.
17 She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation."
18 She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, "In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!" And it came out at that very moment.
19 When her owners realized that their hope of profit was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities.
20 They brought them before the magistrates and said, "These men are Jews, and they are throwing our city into an uproar
21 by advocating customs that are not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice."
22 The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods.
23 After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was ordered to guard them carefully.
24 When he received these orders, he put them in the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them.
26 Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the doors flew open, and everyone's chains came loose.
27 The jailer woke up, and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he assumed the prisoners had escaped.
28 But Paul shouted, "Don't harm yourself! We are all here!"
29 The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas.
30 He brought them out and asked, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"
31 They replied, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved — you and your household."
32 Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house.
33 At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized.
34 The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he and his whole household had come to believe in God.
35 When daylight came, the magistrates sent their officers to the jailer with the order, "Release those men."
36 The jailer told Paul, "The magistrates have ordered that you and Silas be released. Now you can leave. Go in peace."
37 But Paul said to the officers, "They beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and threw us into prison. And now do they want to get rid of us quietly? No! Let them come themselves and escort us out."
38 The officers reported this to the magistrates, and when they heard that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens, they were alarmed.
39 They came and apologized to them, and led them out of the prison, asking them to leave the city.
40 After Paul and Silas came out of the prison, they went to Lydia's house, where they met with the brothers and sisters and encouraged them. Then they left.
Translation notes (10)
- Acts 16:3a Greek dia tous Ioudaious, 'because of the Jews', marks the motive as social rather than soteriological. Since Timothy's mother was Jewish (Acts 16:1), Jews would have regarded him as an uncircumcised Jew, a hindrance to synagogue access. Paul refused the same rite for Titus, a full Gentile, when it was demanded as a condition of salvation (Galatians 2:3).
- Acts 16:6a The Greek phrase tēn Phrygian kai Galatikēn chōran, 'the Phrygian and Galatian region', is grammatically ambiguous and underlies the long-standing debate over whether Paul evangelized ethnic Galatia in the north or the southern cities of the Roman province. The participle kōlythentes, 'having been prevented', is aorist, suggesting the Spirit's restraint preceded or accompanied the journey itself.
- Acts 16:7a The phrase to pneuma Iesou, 'the Spirit of Jesus', occurs only here in the New Testament. The earliest manuscripts, including Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, and Alexandrinus, contain Iesou, while later manuscripts behind the King James tradition read simply 'the Spirit'. The fuller reading identifies the guiding Spirit directly with the risen Jesus.
- Acts 16:12a Greek kolōnia, a loanword from Latin colonia, denotes specifically a Roman colony, so 'Roman' is supplied for clarity; Philippi's colonists held Roman citizenship and Italian legal privileges, which underlies the appeal to Roman status later in the chapter. The phrase prōtē polis, 'a leading city', claims prominence rather than official capital status, which belonged to Thessalonica.
- Acts 16:13a Greek proseuchē (προσευχή), literally 'prayer', was a standard term in Diaspora Judaism for a Jewish place of prayer, attested in inscriptions from Egypt as early as the third century BC and in Philo and Josephus. It may denote a synagogue building or a less formal open-air meeting site; the riverside setting at Philippi suggests the latter.
- Acts 16:14a Greek porphyropōlis, 'dealer in purple', identifies Lydia with the luxury dye trade for which Thyatira, in the Roman province of Asia, was noted; inscriptions from the city attest a guild of dyers. The phrase sebomenē ton theou, 'who worshiped God', marks her as a Gentile adherent of the synagogue, the class Luke elsewhere calls God-fearers.
- Acts 16:16a Greek pneuma pythōna (πνεῦμα πύθωνα), literally 'a python spirit', alludes to the serpent Apollo was said to have slain at Delphi, whose oracle was called the Pythia. By the first century the term denoted a spirit of divination generally, so the phrase marks the girl as an oracular medium in the Greco-Roman sense. The word manteuomenē, 'fortune-telling', appears only here in the New Testament.
- Acts 16:20a Greek strategois, 'magistrates', is Luke's rendering of the Latin title for the two chief officials (duumviri) who governed Philippi as a Roman colony; the term shows his familiarity with local civic usage. The charge itself trades on Roman suspicion of foreign cults, framing the missionaries' Jewishness as inherently disruptive to civic order.
- Acts 16:21a The Greek ethē, 'customs', points to religious practices as much as civic habits. Roman law traditionally barred citizens from adopting foreign rites not sanctioned by the state, a principle Cicero articulates in De Legibus. The accusers thus frame the missionaries' preaching as a legal offense against Roman identity, not merely a disturbance of the peace.
- Acts 16:37a Greek akatakritous, 'uncondemned', is the legal crux: Roman law, notably the Valerian and Porcian laws, forbade the beating of citizens without trial, and magistrates who violated this protection faced serious penalties. Paul's demand that the magistrates escort them out publicly forced an official acknowledgment of the wrong, likely protecting the new congregation at Philippi.
About this translation
The Trinity Bible Version (TBV) is Trinity Bible's own modern English translation, worked directly from the original Greek and honest to the earliest manuscripts. It was completed in 2026 — the most modern English Bible translation — and is exclusive to Trinity Bible. Every chapter, including all of Acts, is free to read here on the web.
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