other · 34 · Gaza
He was told to go to the desert road, and found a court official of the Candace — the queen of the Kushites — in a chariot, reading Isaiah aloud and getting nowhere with it. Do you understand what you are reading? How can I, unless someone guides me? Then the passage about the sheep led to the slaughter, and the question of whom the prophet meant, and by the time they reached water the man wanted baptising. See, here is water! What prevents me? Nothing did. Two cautions belong on the row. This event carries no place, because Acts names the road and not the destination — the man goes on his way rejoicing and out of the record. And Candace's Ethiopia is Nubia, the kingdom of Meroe on the Nile, not the highland Ethiopia whose church dates itself from Frumentius three centuries later; the two get run together constantly and are not the same country.
To go south on the road to Gaza, on no stated errand.
The first foreigner baptised in Acts, and a chariot going home to Nubia with the gospel in it.