“The gods have come down to us in human form!”
When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices in the Lycaonian language: 'The gods have come down to us in human form!' Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. (Acts 14:11–13 BSB)
What it sounds like today
An absurd overreaction to a healing.
The cultural key
Not absurd locally: the region told a famous legend, preserved by Ovid, in which Zeus and Hermes visited the Phrygian hill country disguised as men, were turned away by every household except one old couple, and drowned the inhospitable rest. A town raised on that story was not going to make the same mistake twice: hence the priest of Zeus arriving with oxen and garlands at the gates. The casting follows the myth's logic: Hermes was the gods' spokesman, so the 'chief speaker' Paul gets his part, and Barnabas is Zeus. The same crowd's mythology cuts the other way days later: gods who bleed when stoned are impostors.
Recovered meaning
The missionaries walk into a town pre-loaded with a script about divine visitors and barely escape being sacrificed to, then are stoned when the script flips. Luke's comic-horrific scene is a study in what happens when the gospel lands on a fully furnished pagan imagination.