Jarrel - Baptist Church Perpetuity - Landmark Baptist

(3) The council of five hundred corresponded to our Senate or the House of
Lords. Ephesus, then, had an ecclesia, and its meeting place the great theater
of the city, and its duty to look after the general peace and welfare of the city
— not to sit as a criminal court to try personal offenses.
“Let us now examine Luke’s account of what took place, remembering that
the ecclesia may have been in session before the uproar commenced, or that it,
as it was its duty to do, came immediately together as soon as cognizant of it.
Demetrius and his workmen and the mob, having seized Gaius and
Aristarchus, rushed with them into the assembly, ‘and some [of the mob] cried
one thing and some another, and the ecclesia was confused’ by these varied
cries, while no definite charge was brought to its notice of which it could take
cognizance. Now mark it was not the ecclesia that was riotous, but ‘oklos’ —
crowd that had rushed into the theater where the ecclesia assembly of Ephesus
was in orderly session, or had gathered to hold one; for it was the ‘oklos,’ not
the ecclesia, that the presiding officer of the ecclesia quieted. (See Acts
19:35.) He informed this riotous, ‘oklos’ crowd, ‘if Demetrius and the
workmen with him had a charge against any man, there were the courts and
the proconsuls; but if it was about other things the ecclesia would settle it.’
The ecclesia was responsible for public tumults, insurrections, etc., and the
officer appealed to the crowd to be quiet and disperse, ‘for,’ said he, speaking
for the ecclesia, ‘we are even in danger of being accused about the tumult of
to-day, there being no cause by which we [the ecclesia] can excuse this
concourse’ — sustrophes — not ecclesia. And having said this, he adjourned,
dissolved, the assembly — ecclesia — not the sustrophes — mob — which he
could not dismiss. Now, in this account, we have, in Greek, four terms used:
‘demos,’ people; ‘oklos,’ crowd; ‘sustrophes,’ mob; ‘ecclesia,’ assembly — a
body having civil jurisdiction. Ecclesia and sustrophes are never used
interchangeably, never mean the same body.”
Were we to admit that ecclesia here meant a “mob,” since the church in no way
involves a mob, this passage has no bearing on what is the church. Liddell and
Scott, in their Greek Lexicon, define the word, “ekklesia, an assembly of
citizens summoned by the crier, the legislative assembly.”
Dean Trench says:
“Ekklesiaa, as all know, was the lawful assembly in a free Greek city of all
those possessed of the rights of citizenship, for the transaction of public
affairs. That they were summoned is expressed in the latter part of the word;
that they were summoned out of the whole population, a select portion of it,
including neither the populace, not yet strangers, nor those who had forfeited
their civic rights — this is expressed in the first. Both the calling and the
calling out, are moments to be remembered, when the word is assumed into a
higher Christian sense, for in them the chief part of its peculiar adaptation to
its auguster uses lie.”