A REALLY BIG Misunderstanding

About a 19 mile journey southwest of Iconium, we found Lystra to be a fertile, well-watered landscape. Its population was made up of mostly uneducated gentiles who spoke Lycaonian - an ancient local language - even though as a Roman colony the official language was Latin. This was a challenge for us, as we had difficulty making ourselves known among them.

There was no established Jewish community here, so obviously there was no synagogue. It was some hard ground to sow into, that's for sure. All of this added up to a sticky situation when G-d's power came and did a miraculous healing of a man born crippled - when he leapt up to his feet, the crowd of bystanders went crazy! They started calling out in their own language that we were gods and stirring everyone up to worship us.

WELL! That was not going to work at all - once we realized what was going on (they were gearing up do make a sacrifice to us! As though we were Zeus and Hermes!) we did our best to set them straight, and then we began to explain about God - basic stuff - how He reveals Himself through Creation and providing for his people through the harvest, and so on.

They were starting to catch on but then, wouldn't you know it, those stinkin' Jews from Iconium - the ones that had been plotting our demise showed up and turned everyone against us.

Things went pretty sour after that - we got beat up badly, Paul was unconscious and the angry mob dragged him to the city limits and left him for dead.

We (myself and some of our new converts) formed a prayer circle around him and praise G-d, he came to, we all returned to town for the night.
Needless to say, we left the next day for Derbe.