Acts 14:11

The gods are come down - Which the heathens supposed they frequently did; But how amazingly does the prince of darkness blind the minds of them that believe not! The Jews would not own Christ's Godhead, though they saw him work numberless miracles.

And when the people saw what Paul had done,....

The outrage of the people against Paul, at the instigation of the Jews, the effect of which was that they stoned him, as they thought, to death; but he was wonderfully restored to life,

in the speech of Lycaonia--whether a corruption of the Greek tongue, which was well enough understood in this region, or the remains of some older tongue, is not known. The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men--the language of an unsophisticated people.

quarantine:debris (2026-07-29) — starts-lowercase

Saying, in the speech of Lycaonia - What this language was has puzzled the learned not a little. Calmet thinks it was a corrupt Greek dialect; as Greek was the general language of Asia Minor. Mr. Paul Ernest Jablonski, who has written a dissertation expressly on the subject, thinks it was the same language with that of the Cappadocians, which was mingled with Syriac. That it was no dialect of the Greek must be evident from the circumstance of its being here distinguished from it. We have sufficient proofs from ancient authors that most of these provinces used different languages; and it is correctly remarked, by Dr. Lightfoot, that the Carians, who dwelt much nearer Greece than the Lycaonians, are called by Homer, βαρβαροφωνοι, people of a barbarous or strange language; and Pausanias also called them Barbari. That the language of Pisidia was distinct from the Greek we have already seen, note on Act 13:15. We have no light to determine this point; and every search after the language of Lycaonia must be, at this distance of time, fruitless. The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men - From this, and from all heathen antiquity, it is evident: 1. That the heathen did not consider the Divine nature, how low soever they rated it, to be like the human nature. 2. That they imagined that these celestial beings often assumed human forms to visit men, in order to punish the evil and reward the good. The Metamorphoses of Ovid are full of such visitations; and so are Homer, Virgil, and other poets. The angels visiting Abraham, Jacob, Lot, etc., might have been the foundation on which most of these heathen fictions were built. The following passage in Homer will cast some light upon the point: - Και τε Θεοι, ξεινοισιν εοικοτες αλλοδαποισι, Παντοιοι τελεθοντες, επιϚρωφωσι ποληας, Ανθρωπων ὑβριν τε και ευνομιην εφορωντες. Hom. Odyss. xvii. ver. […]