Who was Philip the Evangelist?
The baptism of the eunuch by Rembrandt, 1626, depicting Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Philip was told to ‘Go south.’ The person who gave him this instruction is called an angel of the Lord , although in later stages of the story, it is ‘the Spirit’ who directed him to the Ethiopian and ‘the Spirit of the Lord’ who then took him away again. Philip was sent to (and along) the desert road that goes down about sixty miles from Jerusalem to Gaza , which was the most southerly of the five Philistine cities, and near the Mediterranean coast . Whether the Gaza in question was ‘old Gaza’ which had been destroyed in 93 BC, or ‘new Gaza’ which had been built further south some thirty-five years later, we are not told. In either case, the road was well used, for it continued past Gaza to Egypt and so to the African continent. Philip meets the Ethiopian (Acts 8:27–29) The ‘Ethiopia’ of those days corresponded to what we call ‘the Upper Nile’, reaching approxi