Turned Upside Down

What the Crowd Said in Thessalonica

The mob went looking for Paul and Silas at the house of a man named Jason, and when they couldn’t find them, they took Jason instead. Luke tells it in a few lines.

“And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, ‘These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.’”

— Acts 17:6 to 7 (ESV)

They meant it as an insult. Christians have repeated it ever since as a boast, usually with a warm smile and a feeling that the early church was a sort of energetic youth group. I think the boast is right. The crowd wasn’t complaining about noise, though. Read the charge again and notice the word that carries it, which is “king”. Nobody gets dragged before magistrates for being loud. They were dragged there over a loyalty.

So the question worth asking is what the crowd saw that we have stopped seeing. To answer it we have to go to Thessalonica itself, and then to what Jesus actually taught about power, because that is where the upside down part lives.

A City That Owed Everything to Caesar

Thessalonica in Paul’s day was a Greek seaport and trading city that Rome had made a free city. Free did not mean independent. A Dallas Theological Seminary writer puts it plainly, saying the city could mint its own currency, make its own laws and govern itself through local authorities, but that this freedom depended on its loyalty to Rome (Bergthold, 2023). The same article notes that first century inscriptions mention a temple of Caesar there. Another scholar, Callia Rulmu, points to an inscription that J. R. Harrison links to a temple to Caesar in the city (Rulmu, 2010). I would hold the details loosely, since inscriptions are fragments, but the picture is steady. A city that lived on Rome’s favour showed its thanks in public worship of Rome’s rulers.

Luke’s account contains a small detail that rewards attention. The “city authorities” in Acts 17:6 are called politarchs, which is the Greek word he uses. For a long time that looked like a slip, because the title turns up nowhere in surviving Greek literature. Then inscriptions from the region began to turn up, and one stone from an arch at the Vardar Gate, now in the British Museum, named such officials. The old Bible encyclopaedia entry by M. N. Tod says that the title “occurs nowhere in Greek literature”, and that “its correctness is proved beyond possibility of question” by the inscriptions (Tod, 1915). I like this evidence because of what it says about the storyteller. A man inventing a tale does not usually bother to get an odd local job title exactly right. A man reporting what happened sometimes does.

Those politarchs had their own worry, and it wasn’t theology. A free city that let a foreign agitator preach another king could lose its freedom. The authorities in Luke’s account seem to know it. They didn’t convict anyone. They took a security payment from Jason and the rest and let them go.

“And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.”

— Acts 17:9 (ESV)

The gospel arrived in a city where the official answer to “who is lord?” was already written and carved in stone. You can see why a second answer would worry people.

The Decrees Nobody Can Quite Name

“Acting against the decrees of Caesar” is a vague charge, and scholars have never agreed on what it pointed to. I will give three proposals, because the disagreement itself tells you something.

E. A. Judge argued that the decrees were imperial laws against predicting a change of ruler, and he also suggested that a loyalty oath to the emperor might have counted as a “decree” in the minds of the Thessalonians (as reported in Hardin, 2006, and Rulmu, 2010). We have an example of such an oath from Paphlagonia in 3 BC, in which the people swear to Augustus that they will treat his friends as friends and his enemies as enemies, and will report any plot against him (Sherk, 1984). Justin Hardin proposes something different. He suggests the charges, and the seizure of payment, relate to imperial laws repressing the voluntary associations of the Greek and Roman world, which would make Jason’s house an illegal assembly (Hardin, 2006). Bruce Winter, in a book that its reviewer finds persuasive on the spread of the imperial cult and less convincing on its effect on Christians, links the charge to a decree of Claudius and to the idea that converts had stopped giving divine honours to the emperor (Charlesworth, 2017).

I don’t know which of these is right, and I am not sure anyone does. What strikes me is what they share. In all three, the offence is about allegiance. Someone, somewhere in that city, had worked out that the message of this small group was not about private spirituality. It was about who gets the last word.

The crowd’s own language fits. The verb behind “turned upside down” means to disturb, to unsettle, to stir up and overthrow. Thayer’s lexicon notes it can mean stirring up tumults in the state, and the same verb is used in Acts 21:38 when a Roman commander asks Paul whether he is the Egyptian who led a revolt (Strong’s Greek 387, n.d.). And “the world” is the Greek word that, in writers on Roman affairs, was used as a name for the empire (Strong’s Greek 3625, n.d.). So a fair paraphrase of the crowd is this. Men who have unsettled the empire have turned up here too.

They were wrong about the method. They were not wrong about the stakes.

What Paul Wrote to the Same Church

Paul wrote to this church not long after leaving it. Winter, as his reviewer reports him, dates Paul’s visit to about AD 50 to 51 (Charlesworth, 2017). Early in the letter Paul reminds them what the whole region has heard about their conversion.

“and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come.”

— 1 Thessalonians 1:9 to 10 (ESV)

Take the vocabulary of “waiting for a Son from heaven who delivers us” and put it down in a city with a temple of Caesar. In 9 BC the province of Asia adopted a calendar decree that spoke of Augustus’s birthday as “the beginning of the good tidings for the world”, and described him as a saviour sent “both for us and for our descendants” (Wikipedia contributors, n.d. a). Rome had its gospel. It had its saviour. The Thessalonian Christians were telling a different story with the same words.

Paul also writes, a few paragraphs on, that when people are saying “There is peace and security”, sudden destruction will come upon them (1 Thessalonians 5:3). Many scholars hear in that phrase a jab at Roman propaganda about the peace of the empire. Jeffrey Weima argues exactly this (Weima, 2012). Joel White argues that it goes beyond the evidence, since the two words are not found together as a slogan in imperial sources, and the theme of security became prominent in imperial propaganda only later in Nero’s reign (White, 2009). I think White’s caution is fair. I would not hang a case on one phrase.

I don’t need to. A church that has turned from idols to wait for a Son from heaven, and that has to put up a security payment for it, already has a loyalty that Caesar cannot share. Whether Paul meant to mock Rome or not, Rome could see the problem.

How Heaven Counts Greatness

Here we reach what the crowd could not read, and what I think the church has often misread too. The kingdom Jesus announced didn’t rival Caesar by copying him. It overturned the whole idea of what a kingdom is for.

Jesus said it to his own disciples, who had just been quarrelling about rank.

“But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

— Mark 10:43 to 45 (ESV)

The sentence just before it describes the world’s version. Those considered rulers of the Gentiles, he says, “lord it over them” (Mark 10:42). The kingdom of God does not go into competition with that. It refuses the premise. A throne in Jesus’ kingdom is reached by going down, and the man in charge is the one holding the towel.

God says through Isaiah that his thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8). The verse is often read as a comfort in confusing seasons, and it can be. The Gospels show what it looks like when it walks around. Peter learned it the hard way, in a scene most of us would rather forget. Jesus has just told his disciples that he must suffer and die, and Peter takes him aside to correct him.

“But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me. For you are not setting your mind on the things of God, but on the things of man.’”

— Matthew 16:23 (ESV)

Notice that Peter’s idea was sensible. Any person who wanted the kingdom to succeed would have said the same. Jesus calls it the mind of man. And two verses later he states the rule that governs everything else.

“For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

— Matthew 16:25 (ESV)

C. S. Lewis wrote the pattern out in the closing pages of Mere Christianity. “Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life” (Lewis, 1996, as reproduced by Renovare, n.d.). I would only add that this is not a technique. A man who serves in order to be made great hasn’t understood the sentence.

Giving Away and Growing Richer

The same shape shows up in money, which is where most of us feel it first.

“One gives freely, yet grows all the richer; another withholds what he should give, and only suffers want.”

— Proverbs 11:24 (ESV)

The economy we live in runs the other way. Hold on to what you have, guard it, and add to it where you can. That logic isn’t stupid, and in its own field it works. But Proverbs claims that in the kingdom of God a hand held open is the one that stays full.

Some of the preaching that has grown up around this verse has done it no favours. It makes giving into a deposit and God into the bank, and when the return is slow, it advises you to deposit more. That reduces a principle of generosity to a bet. It also gets the direction wrong again, because the whole thing is still about getting, only with a prayer attached. A giving that is secretly a purchase has not turned anything upside down. It has just put a religious label on the old arithmetic.

To be fair to the people who preach about breakthrough, the Bible does show people rising. Joseph goes from a pit to a palace and Daniel ends up in a king’s court, and nobody should apologise for hoping that faithful people will thrive. My complaint is with the sermon that stops there. The passage that goes with Mark 10:44 is not the one about a seat at the table. It is the one about the towel.

The Lamb on the Throne

The clearest picture of this upside down mind is in the last book of the Bible, and it comes as a surprise even to John.

He is weeping because no one in heaven or on earth seems worthy to open the scroll. An elder tells him to stop.

“And one of the elders said to me, ‘Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.’”

— Revelation 5:5 (ESV)

John turns round to look at the Lion. What he sees is something else.

“And between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.”

— Revelation 5:6 (ESV)

He hears conquest and sees a slaughtered lamb. The wounds have not been tidied away for the occasion. They are the reason he is there. Everything else I have said so far lands in this picture. The ruler gets the rule by giving himself away, and the throne belongs to the one who was killed.

Paul says it in a flatter voice in a letter to another Greek city.

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.”

— 1 Corinthians 1:25 (ESV)

Go back now to what the Thessalonian crowd feared. They were afraid that an army was coming, or a rival power with its own legions. No army came. What came was a story about a king who wins by losing, and the mob had no way of weighing it, because their scales had been built for Caesar. The Roman Empire that wrote its saviour’s birthday into its calendar is gone, and the church that carried the Lamb’s story into Thessalonica is still meeting in cities Paul never saw.

Two Nigerians Who Turned Things Over

It would be easy to leave this in the first century, so let me bring it closer.

Samuel Ajayi Crowther was captured as a Yoruba youth by slavers in the early 1820s, and a British antislavery cruiser freed the captives on the ship in Freetown. He was baptised in 1825, ordained in England in 1841, and in 1864 was consecrated bishop for West Africa beyond British jurisdiction, the first African bishop in the Anglican church. He translated the New Testament and the Book of Common Prayer into Yoruba and published a Yoruba dictionary in 1857 (Dictionary of African Christian Biography, n.d.). A youth seized by slavers ended up a bishop with the New Testament in Yoruba to his name. The weapon he used was translation, which put the book into a people’s own tongue.

The same record is honest about what came next. Colonial era missionary opposition undermined his authority, control of finances was handed to a white associate, his mission ship was taken from him, and priests he had ordained were suspended (Dictionary of African Christian Biography, n.d.). Those who did this were also Christians, and they were reading the sentence about the rulers of the Gentiles in a way that suited them. Heaven’s logic doesn’t get adopted by an institution just because the institution has a cross on its building.

Mary Slessor was born in Aberdeen in 1848, arrived in West Africa in 1876 and lived for about fifteen years in Okoyong from 1888. Local belief held that twins were a curse, so infants were often left to die. She rescued hundreds of twins and adopted abandoned children, and in 1892 she became vice consul in Okoyong, where she presided over the local court (Wikipedia contributors, n.d. b). Whatever else one says about the mission era, the picture of a woman with no army walking into a community to take a child out of the bush is the opposite of a conquest.

Neither story is a recipe, and both have their shadows. But they show the same upside down logic doing its work on Nigerian soil. The other side of the ledger is easy to find. Transparency International’s 2025 index, released on 10 February 2026, scored Nigeria 26 out of 100, which put it 142nd of 182 countries, two places down from the year before (allAfrica, 2026). A score like that doesn’t tell us who to blame, and I won’t pretend it settles any argument by itself. But it is a number about the very thing Jesus described in Mark 10:42, a society where those with authority are tempted to lord it over everyone else. The answer in Mark 10:43 is not a policy. It is a kind of person, in an office, a classroom, a church and a shop, who has decided that the basin and the towel are for them.

What This Asks of You

I want to say something plainly to the reader who has been nodding along. It is cheap to admire a Lamb on a throne from the safety of an article.

Think of the room where you actually hold power. It need not be large. It could be a classroom, a ministry team, a market stall, a household with four children and one set of rules. In that room, ask where you are lording it, even gently, and what Mark 10:43 to 45 would change if you took it seriously on Monday. Ask where you are holding your hand closed and calling it prudence. Ask where you have been waiting for the towel to be offered by someone else.

I’d be surprised if the answer didn’t cost something. Jason and the others in Thessalonica had to put up a security payment because of the company they kept. But I’d also be surprised if it didn’t turn out to be the best bargain you ever made, because the one who sits on the throne has never asked anyone to go where he hasn’t already been.

If you try it, write and tell me what happened. I’d like to know what the first Monday looks like.

References

Biblical References

Acts 17:6 to 7 (ESV). The accusation before the city authorities, the framing text of the essay.
Acts 17:9 (ESV). The security payment taken from Jason, showing what the charge cost the church.
1 Thessalonians 1:9 to 10 (ESV). Paul’s summary of the Thessalonians’ conversion, read against the language of imperial salvation.
1 Thessalonians 5:3 (ESV). The phrase “peace and security”, discussed with the scholarly dispute over whether it targets Roman propaganda.
Isaiah 55:8 (ESV). The epigraph and the premise that God’s ways differ from ours.
Mark 10:42 to 45 (ESV). Jesus’ contrast between the rulers of the Gentiles and the servant greatness of his kingdom.
Matthew 16:23 and 16:25 (ESV). Peter’s rebuke for setting his mind on the things of man, and the rule of losing and finding life.
Proverbs 11:24 (ESV). Giving freely and growing richer, with a caution about the prosperity reading.
Revelation 5:5 to 6 (ESV). The Lion announced and the slain Lamb seen, the hinge of the essay.
1 Corinthians 1:25 (ESV). The foolishness and weakness of God as wiser and stronger than men.
Acts 21:38 (no quotation). Cited only for the use of the same verb for a political revolt, taken from Strong’s Greek 387.

Other Sources

allAfrica. (2026, February 10). Nigeria drops two places to 142nd in 2025 corruption ranking, trails 33 African countries. https://allafrica.com/stories/202602100247.html
Bergthold, M. (2023, March 30). Paul in Thessalonica: Facing challenges to loving well. DTS Voice. https://voice.dts.edu/article/paul-in-thessalonica/
Charlesworth, S. D. (2017). Review of Divine honours for the Caesars: The first Christians’ responses by Bruce W. Winter. Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2017.05.49. https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/?p=35406 (Winter’s argument is taken from this review, not from the book.)
Dictionary of African Christian Biography. (n.d.). Crowther, Samuel Ajayi (c. 1808 to 1891). https://dacb.org/stories/nigeria/crowther-samwel/
Hardin, J. K. (2006). Decrees and drachmas at Thessalonica: An illegal assembly in Jason’s house (Acts 17.1 to 10a). New Testament Studies, 52(1), 29 to 49. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/abs/decrees-and-drachmas-at-thessalonica-an-illegal-assembly-in-jasons-house-acts-17110a/16A198056AB9FAEDB1F071D34A04172A (Judge’s view is taken from this abstract.)
Lewis, C. S. (1996). Mere Christianity. Touchstone. (Quoted as reproduced in Renovare, n.d.)
Renovare. (n.d.). Lose your life and you will save it. https://renovare.org/articles/lose-your-life-and-you-will-save-it
Rulmu, C. (2010). Between ambition and quietism: The socio-political background of 1 Thessalonians 4,9 to 12. Biblica, 91, 393 to 417. https://www.bsw.org/biblica/vol-91-2010/between-ambition-and-quietism-the-socio-political-background-of-1-thessalonians-4-9-12/449/article-p406.html
Sherk, R. K. (1984). Oath of loyalty to Augustus in Paphlagonia (translation). In Judaism and Rome database. https://heurist.huma-num.fr/heurist/judaism_and_rome/view/178
Strong’s Greek 387: anastatoó. (n.d.). BibleHub. https://biblehub.com/greek/387.htm
Strong’s Greek 3625: oikoumené. (n.d.). BibleHub. https://biblehub.com/greek/3625.htm
Tod, M. N. (1915). Thessalonica. In International Standard Bible Encyclopedia. https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/def.show/rtd/isbe/id/8731
Weima, J. A. D. (2012). “Peace and security” (1 Thess 5.3): Prophetic warning or political propaganda? New Testament Studies. https://www-cambridge-org.ezproxyberklee.flo.org/core/journals/new-testament-studies/article/peace-and-security-1-thess-53-prophetic-warning-or-political-propaganda/2C7363C9A8CC77B5B2D122AF1955A73E
White, J. (2009). Anti imperial subtexts in Paul: An attempt at building a firmer foundation. Biblica, 90, 305 to 333. https://www.bsw.org/biblica/vol-90-2009/anti-imperial-subtexts-in-paul-an-attempt-at-building-a-firmer-foundation/22/article-p313.html
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d. a). Priene calendar inscription. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priene_calendar_inscription
Wikipedia contributors. (n.d. b). Mary Slessor. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Slessor

Translation Notices

ESV: Scripture quotations are from the ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. (Confirm current wording with Crossway before publication.)