When I was an evangelical teenager, many of my friends and mentors were convinced that everyone should have a “life verse.” This was a verse from the Bible that supposedly encapsulated something about your life—something you struggled with, something you aspired to, something you needed to be reminded of, and so on. I honestly cannot recall whether I ever chose a “life verse” or not—that tells you how central the concept was to my life—but I was very aware of others having a “life verse” and the way it worked for them.
All these years later I am probably even farther from having a “life verse” than I was then, but I do have some favorite passages. I love John 4, the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. I could read and re-read Job chapters 38 and 39 forever, where God narrates the endless boundaries of creation. There are passages from Paul’s letters and Revelation that never get old for me, and I am partial to the spooky parts of the Torah, like where Jacob wrestles with the angel (or with God?) and the humans build the Tower of Babel. These aren’t “life verses” for me, in any inspirational sense, but they are parts of the Bible that are so compelling, beautiful, strange, or perplexing that I cannot get enough of them. But out of all my favorite passages in the Bible, one from this week’s lectionary readings stands out: the Acts 8 story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch.
I love this story. It’s so fantastically weird, full of evocative detail, and out-of-nowhere that I can hardly contain my excitement about it. Books and articles have been written about this passage, and I have just finished writing quite a few pages about it myself, in a forthcoming book on Acts. There is so much going on here that it’s hard to settle on one coherent theme or thread, so I am going to do the thing where I use bullet points to move through the text. But in this case, it’s not because my thoughts are disorganized, like they can sometimes be…it’s because there are so many different angles to this story that it’s impossible to pick just one.
· In the list of texts that are usually trotted out as evidence of the Bible’s views on human sexuality—the so-called “clobber passages”—this story is not one of them. People love to point to Romans 1:25-27 or Leviticus 18:22 or some of the other of these passages as evidence of the Bible’s opposition to homosexuality, even though those passages generally don’t mean what people think they mean, aren’t very thoroughly argued in the text itself, and are quite marginal to the rest of the biblical text. To paint with what might be a too-broad brush, if someone is quoting the Bible to you as evidence against someone else’s sexuality, they probably aren’t a very thoughtful interpreter of the Bible. But this passage, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, is rarely cited in those debates. Perhaps that’s because this passage offers an extremely affirming view of a person whose gender (and perhaps sexuality) would have been understood as unusual or even defiantly dangerous in the Bible’s own time and place. The word “eunuch” could refer to a few different things in the ancient world, but in this case it seems to refer to someone who had been castrated during youth for service in a royal court setting. The thinking was that eunuchs were especially suited for this kind of work, since they were not dangerous as threats to the bloodline, since they could not father children. This Ethiopian eunuch is described as working in the Ethiopian royal court, so that is probably what happened to him. Far from marginalizing the eunuch for his gender difference or casting him out, the text of Acts—as well as Philip and the Spirit who told Philip to approach the eunuch in the first place—affirms him and portrays him as an especially pious person who is interested in hearing religious truth. There is no hint of controversy in this passage; the eunuch is a paragon of faithfulness, in spite of—or, many modern interpreters point out—perhaps because of the difference in his gender and sexuality.
· Gender isn’t the only distinctive thing about this eunuch. He is also Ethiopian, marking him as an outsider to the rest of the story of Acts, which takes place mostly on an east-to-west axis from Jerusalem to Rome. Ethiopia, however, is found farther south, in the southern reaches of North Africa. (Scholars debate whether “Ethiopia” in the text refers to somewhere close to modern Ethiopia, or to the kingdom of Meroe, or somewhere closer to modern Sudan, but its location in Africa is certain. In fact, “Ethiopia” could refer in ancient sources to the regions south of Egypt generally). Interestingly, and disappointingly, there is a long tradition of scholars trying to minimize this eunuch’s Ethiopian-ness. Some have insisted that, despite the text calling him Ethiopian, he must have had light skin. (Those scholars are telling on themselves). On a more meta level, many maps of the “Biblical World” found in textbooks and study Bibles don’t include Ethiopia or any other parts of North Africa, even though these were critical biblical geographies. This kind of scholarly racism can be shoved aside; the meaning of the text seems clear enough: the Ethiopian eunuch had traveled from Africa, and he almost certainly had very dark skin. This last detail probably matters far more to us in the 21st century than it did to the author of Acts, who lived long before our modern black/white racisms developed, and who would have lived in a world where the Roman Empire brought “European” and “African” people (and other kinds of people too) in contact with each other all the time. In fact, this is probably the author’s point in including the Ethiopian eunuch in the story in the first place. Acts’ geographical agenda is made clear from its earliest verses: to show the spread of Jesus’ message “in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Nowhere could have signified the “ends of the earth” to a first-century Mediterranean audience better than Ethiopia.
· The Ethiopian eunuch carries a fascinating mixture of status and wealth markers. His gender is minoritized, as we have already discussed. Since he was castrated as a youth, he was likely enslaved. But that afforded him a place in the court of the Ethiopian Candace, a position that seems to have given him high prestige and access to wealth. (Candace is not her name; Candace is the title of the queen of Ethiopia). He’s riding in a chariot and reading a scroll, both of which were likely wildly expensive propositions. His ability to read the scroll suggests literacy, which would have been rare in those days. And his position within the text of Acts is bolstered by his clear fascination with Jerusalem and the Jewish God; he had been in Jerusalem to worship in the temple there. That makes him either a very faithful diasporic Jew (which did not, just for the record, preclude his skin being dark), or a very faithful “righteous gentile,” a non-Jew who was compelled by the worship of the Jewish God. Either way the text of Acts is presenting him as someone who is especially religiously attuned and worthy of respect. This swirl and mixture of status and wealth markers make him a fascinating figure—someone who was likely enslaved, who had experienced violence against his body, but who had access to substantial wealth and power and who used that wealth and power to travel to Jerusalem for worship. There’s no one else in the canon of scripture quite like the Ethiopian eunuch.
· Whenever I am teaching this passage, I have my students take a look at Acts 8:37. Go look at it now and then come back. Here’s a link to the lectionary texts again if that helps.
· Acts 8:37 is a good example of a section of the text that scholars (mostly) agree was a later addition. It’s excluded from most modern translations for a few reasons, including that it doesn’t appear in all the oldest manuscripts, and that it reads like a later baptismal formula that has been dropped into the text by someone who was retrofitting later (3rd or 4th century?) liturgy into a 1st or 2nd century text. Interestingly, some Christian traditions today use this baptismal formula in modern baptisms, despite the fact that it no longer appears in modern Bibles. This (missing) verse is also a great example of how much work has already been done on our Bibles by editors and translators even before we ever pick them up.
· 8:38 in the NRSV says “Philip baptized him,” but the Greek is more ambiguous. It just says “he baptized him,” with the “he” embedded in the third person of the verb. Almost certainly the NRSV is correct, and Philip did the baptizing (why else did the Spirit send him there in the first place), but several scholars have noted how strange the ambiguity is there.
· Several commentators have also noticed how unlikely, and convenient, roadside water, enough for baptism, would have been in the desert wilderness.
· One of the things I discuss in my forthcoming Acts book is the way divine presence controls people’s bodies. In Acts, the Spirit (usually) and the Lord (sometimes) can be found directing, showing, telling, guiding, filling, appointing, blocking, forbidding, and capturing characters in the narrative. In that book, I describe the Spirit in particular as a bullying figure. Even if you think that the Spirit’s control of bodies is righteous and appropriate, it is striking how often the Spirit subsumes people’s wills and imposes itself and its wishes. One of the key texts for that argument is this one, where the Spirit “snatches” Philip in verse 8:39, and deposits him in a new place. The verb here is a strong one, with connotations of seizure and even kidnapping. The Spirit essentially teleports Philip without his foreknowledge or consent. I suspect that if we could ask Philip how he felt about it, he would probably have been fine with it, but still: it’s a strange power dynamic in the text that I’m not quite sure how to feel about.
In the context of Acts, this story kind of comes out of nowhere and then dissipates back into nothing. It’s not especially connected to anything else, except by the figure of Philip, who is himself not one of Acts’ headliners. Geographically, it’s set apart and vague, and narratively, the episode doesn’t connect to much else in the story, aside from the book’s persistent interest in geographical expansiveness. It’s a one-off story with lots of fascinating details and a bunch of interpretive potential. The story of the Ethiopian eunuch isn’t quite a “life verse,” but it’s an intriguing case study in the rich potentiality of biblical texts and the many different ways they can reflect our ideas, biases, desires, and questions.