The Seven – Parmenas, Philip, Prochorus, Nicolas, Nicanor, Silas, and Timon – visited a lunatic camp outside the Ephesus city wall, intending to demonstrate the power of Christ; and "they took it upon themselves, in the name of the Lord Jesus, to cast out evil spirits." Meeting with one odd duck, the Seven said: "We exorcise you in the name of Jesus...." (Acts 19:14).

Paul told the Christians of Ephesus that he just could not stop laughing, when he heard that story. He said that it sometimes takes a lunatic to teach a lesson to "these vagabond Jewish exorcists."

That's when certain unbelieving Jews spread a rumour that the Seven, though Jewish, were born-again Christians and well-known missionaries (Acts 21:8). They said that one of the Seven was the Apostle Philip, who was one of Jesus' Twelve original disciples; that the Jews had no Chief Priest named "Sceva," that Sceva was an elder of the Antioch Church. "And was it not a Jewish physician," they asked, "who dressed the wounds of the naked and bleeding Seven after they fled from the camp of lunatics? So why all of this anti-Semitic sarcasm?" But Paul said that the unbelieving Jews could just go to Hell, and probably would.

To celebrate the lunatic's victory over those "stupid Jewish vagabond exorcists who I never even saw before," Paul ordered the Christians of Ephesus to beg, borrow, or steal every Jewish, Talmudic or Cabbalistic-type book they could find.

So the brothers and sisters did that. They worked hard, going from door to door, and from shop to shop. In the space of a few weeks, they had gathered a collection of "Jew literature" worth more than 50,000 denarii (Acts 19:19).

To put that into perspective: one denarius in those days bought you sixteen donkeys. One healthy donkey today will cost you about $200. So we're in the neighbourhood of 50,000 x $3,200 = $160 million worth of Jewish books and scrolls.

Now when the Ephesians saw the mountain of Jewish books that had been gathered, and were told of the enormous fortune that could be had by selling them, Paul asked his brothers and sisters in Christ to ask themselves, What would Jesus do?

Surprisingly, none of them knew for sure what Jesus would do, since most of the Ephesian Christians were illiterate. So Paul showed them: he set the books on fire.

What a conflagration! Paul's blaze lasted all night long. Meanwhile, the congregation praised the Lord and sang hymns. A youth minister and his wife roasted kebabs for the children. Three days later, the embers were still smoking. The Christians of Ephesus agreed that it was the best book-burning party that their church had ever seen. "And this was known to all the Jews and Greeks also dwelling at Ephesus; and fear fell on them all, and the reputation of the Lord Jesus was magnified" (Acts 19:17).

Historical footnote: Some Christians say that Saint Paul still holds the world's record for the most Jewish books burned, but that's not strictly correct. His record was decisively beaten in the fourth century by Saint Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, who ordered all non-Christian books to be torched; libraries were burned to the ground all across the crumbling Roman empire (the better part of classical Greek and Roman literature went up in flames as well). The Lutheran Church from 1543 to 1945 burned more Talmudic literature than trees, in obedience to Martin Luther's doctrine that Jewish books should be viewed as an alternative fuel source. But for a one-night blaze, Paul did pretty well. Never – not even on 10 May, 1933, when the Lutherans burned some twenty thousand Jewish books in a single night in Berlin's Opernplatz – has Paul's $160 million Ephesus book-blaze ever been surpassed.

– L.