In Acts 18:2,3 we read:
"There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them."
OK, simple enough--in English that is. When we start looking at it in ancient Greek it gets a little more complex, but we'll get to that later. First though, I have to ask a logical question. If Paul, Priscilla and Aquila were tentmakers in the cosmopolitan city of Rome, and later in the equally cosmopolitan city of Corinth, who were their customers? First century camping enthusiasts perhaps? Maybe the military but one would think that they would employ their own tentmakers. Bedouin nomads used tents but not only were they 800+ km away from Corinth (and over 1000km away from Rome) they made their own tents. (I admit that they might have had a small market in merchants who might use tents as awnings in the marketplace.)
Now let's take a look at the Greek. The passage reads in Greek:
και δια το ο μοτεχνον ειναι ε μενεν παρ αντοις και η ργαζετο: η σαν γαρ σκηνοποιοι τη τεχνη.
Let's look at σκηνοποιοi (pronounced SKAY-no-poi-oi), the word commonly translated as "tentmakers". This word is used only this one time in the Bible, in fact it's not known to have been used anywhere else in any ancient Greek literature, but this is not uncommon. In ancient Greek, compound words were often made up to define things. In this case the suffix ποιοi means "maker" or "craftsman". It has no other meaning. The prefix Σ κηνοσ (skenos) however can mean "tent" or "stage" as in a theatre stage. (Skenos is where we get the English theatrical terms "scene" and "scenery" by the way) Is it possible that Paul and Co. were theatrical scenery makers?
In speaking of Christians as " fools" or "clowns" μωροι (pronounced MO-roi) for the sake of Christ (1 Cor. 1:27; 4:10; 2 Cor. 11:16-17) or of himself and the apostles as having "become a spectacle θεατρον (THE-a-tron) to the world" (1 Cor. 4:9), could Paul be drawing on first hand experience with the theatre?
I know that the arguments set forth here are pretty weak, but then, so are the arguments that Paul was an actual tentmaker. Also, I could point out that the writer of Acts, writing in an urban setting for an urban audience, would take it as a given that his readers would think in terms of the theatre when seeing the word skenos rather than tents. It would only be later, when the theatre fell out of favor with Christianized Rome that the other meaning of skenos, that of tents and tentmaking would become more popular with Christian scholars and would be translated that way into other languages.
Thanks for reading!
CyrusThePersian