savage wolves

“savage wolves” is the image in Paul’s farewell address for forces that threaten the congregation from outside and distort its teaching from within. It makes the elders’ work concrete: as shepherds and overseers, they are to teach the community, hold it together, and guard its vision of the Realm. The image also carries a warning about its own use. Luke applies inherited Jewish language to Jewish leaders, yet the later history of the church turns the accusation back upon Christians, whose own violence against Jewish communities shows how readily a community can become the predator it claims to resist.

The image in Paul’s farewell address

In Acts 20:18–35, Paul speaks to the elders in a farewell address that summarizes the legacy he hopes to leave and offers an extended account of their responsibility. He recalls enduring trials while continuing to offer repentance to both Jewish and Greek people. He is on his way to Jerusalem, where the Spirit has revealed that imprisonment and persecution await him, but he hopes to finish his course. That record of faithfulness under pressure gives weight to his warning: he has not withheld what the community needs in order to face what comes next.

The “savage wolves” are part of that warning. Paul says he has prepared the community for danger from outside, as well as for distortion arising among its own members. The threat is therefore not only an attack from beyond the congregation’s boundaries. It can also take shape within the community, when people who belong to it alter the truth the congregation has been taught. The metaphor gives both dangers a common consequence: they can pull the flock apart and undermine its shared direction.

Elders as shepherds and overseers

The flock image frames the elders’ vocation. Drawing on historic Jewish language, Paul presents the congregation as a flock and its elders as shepherds and overseers. “Overseer” translates the Greek episkopos, or bishop; here it denotes a local leader entrusted with the care of a congregation. The shepherd’s task includes keeping the flock together for safety, providing food, guarding against predators, tending wounded sheep, and disciplining members who wander.

This imagery makes leadership a practice of sustained care rather than merely a title or a single ritual duty. The elders must help the congregation remain together and nourish it with teaching, while also recognizing threats and responding when members stray. Their work is tied to the future Paul holds before them: they are to build up the church so that its participants may receive their inheritance, a place in the eschatological Realm. Teaching the Realm is thus both formation and protection; it sustains the congregation against external attacks and internal distortion.

The commentary applies this account to church life beyond the scene. In the author’s tradition, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), elders are lay leaders elected by the congregation, and their service is often narrowed to praying over the loaf and cup. Paul’s address supports a wider understanding: elders are to teach the congregation the ways of the Realm. Such teaching need not be confined to lectures or classrooms; it can happen in varied settings and modes.

Scriptural inheritance and the danger of accusation

Luke’s use of “wolves” draws on Ezekiel’s description of unfaithful Jewish leaders. The commentary identifies this as a modest use of vaticinium ex eventu, or prophecy after the fact: Luke speaks in the future tense as though predicting events that have already occurred in his own congregation. In doing so, he applies a scriptural image to some Jewish leaders of his day. The metaphor therefore belongs both to Paul’s warning about the congregation’s future and to Luke’s later interpretation of its experience.

That application has a serious edge. The image identifies leaders whom Luke regards as threats, but it also turns Jewish scriptural language into a charge against Jewish leaders. The commentary asks readers to consider how that charge might be misused and what happens when a community teaches its inherited language without adequate care. The danger is not only that a congregation will fail to recognize harm; it may also learn to cast others as predators while leaving its own conduct unexamined.

The reversal of the metaphor

The painful irony identified by the commentary is historical. Luke perceived Jewish leaders of his day as savage wolves; at most, the commentary says, such leaders might have tried to discipline Jewish members of Luke’s congregation. Within only a few years, however, the roles would reverse: the church itself would become the savage wolf at the synagogue door.

The account traces the consequences of that reversal through the church’s segregation, pogroms, and Inquisition, and ultimately to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jewish people. These later crimes are not events in Paul’s farewell scene; they are the commentary’s warning about the long afterlife of its rhetoric. The metaphor’s moral force changes when the church becomes a persecutor: language once aimed at those understood as threats can help conceal the violence of the community using it. The need to teach adequately is therefore inseparable from the need to examine whom the church names as dangerous and what it does in the name of that judgment.

The Realm, material care, and the image’s test

Paul’s closing example gives the elders a practical measure of faithful community. He says he earned his own keep, and the commentary presents him as a fully functioning member of the community of the Realm because he used material resources to support people whose resources were marginal. His warning about predators is therefore not detached from economic life: a community is sustained not only by guarding its teaching but also by making provision for its vulnerable members.

The saying Paul attributes to Jesus—“It is more blessed to give than to receive”—links giving to participation in the Realm. The commentary notes that the saying appears nowhere else and that Luke may have heard it from an early Christian prophet, recalled it imprecisely, or created it. In this interpretation, blessing means awareness of belonging to the Realm: as people make their resources available to the community, they experience the Realm’s presence more fully, and their own sense of well-being grows with their investment. That practice offers a countermeasure to the wolf image’s logic. The community’s lasting security depends not on assigning the predator label to others, but on teaching the Realm, preserving communal life, and sharing resources with those in need.