Acts 23

30. Ox the morrow, because he would have known the certainty wherefore he was accused of the Jews, he loosed him from his bands, and commanded the chief priests and all their 1 council to appear, and brought Paul down, and set him before them. And Paul, earnestly beholding the council, said, Men and brethren, I have lived in all good conscience before 2 God until this day. And the high priest Ananias commanded them that stood by him to 3 smite him on the mouth. Then said Paul unto him, God shall smite thee, thou whited wall: for sittest thou to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the 4 law? And they that stood by said, Revilest thou God’s high priest? Then said Paul, I 5 wist not, brethren, that he was the high priest: for it is written, Thou shalt not speak evil 6 of the ruler of thy people. But when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees, he cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee, the son 7 of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question. And when he had so said, there arose a dissension between the Pharisees and the Sadducees: and the 8 multitude was divided. For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, 9 nor spirit: but the Pharisees confess both. And there arose a great cry: and the scribes that were of the Pharisees’ part arose, and strove, saying, We find no evil in this man: but 10 if a spirit or an angel hath spoken to him, let us not fight against God. And when there arose a great dissension, the chief captain, fearing lest Paul should have been pulled in pieces of them, commanded the soldiers to go down, and to take him by force from among 11 them, and to bring him into the castle. And the night following the Lord stood by him, and said, Be of good cheer, Paul: for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou bear witness also at Rome. 12 And when it was day, certain of the Jews banded together, and bound themselves under 13 a curse, saying that they would neither eat nor drink till they had killed Paul. And they 14 were more than forty which had made this conspiracy. And they came to the chief priests and elders, and said, We have bound ourselves under a great curse, that we will eat nothing 15 until we have slain Paul. Now therefore ye with the council signify to the chief captain that he bring him down unto you to morrow, as though ye would inquire something more 16 perfectly concerning him: and we, or ever he come near, are ready to kill him. And when Paul’s sister’s son heard of their lying in wait, he went and entered into the castle, and told 17 Paul. Then Paul called one of the centurions unto him, and said, Bring this young man 18 unto the chief captain: for he hath a certain thing to tell him. So he took him, and brought him to the chief captain, and said, Paul the prisoner called me unto him, and prayed me to 19 bring this young man unto thee, who hath something to say unto thee. Then the chief captain took him by the hand, and went with him aside privately, and asked him, What is 20 that thou hast to tell me? And he said, The Jews have agreed to desire thee that thou wouldest bring down Paul to morrow into the council, as though they would inquire some- 21 what of him more perfectly. But do not thou yield unto them: for there lie in wait for him of them more than forty men, which have bound themselves with an oath, that they will neither eat nor drink till they have killed him: and now are they ready, looking for a 22 promise from thee. So the chief captain then let the young man depart, and charged him, 23 See thou tell no man that thou hast shewed these things to me. And he called unto him two centurions, saying, Make ready two hundred soldiers to go to Cæsarea, and horsemen 24 threescore and ten, and spearmen two hundred, at the third hour of the night; and provide 25 them beasts, that they may set Paul on, and bring him safe unto Felix the governor. And 26 he wrote a letter after this manner: Claudius Lysias unto the most excellent governor Felix 27 sendeth greeting. This man was taken of the Jews, and should have been killed of them: 28 then came I with an army, and rescued him, having understood that he was a Roman. And when I would have known the cause wherefore they accused him, I brought him forth into 29 their council: whom I perceived to be accused of questions of their law, but to have no- 30 thing laid to his charge worthy of death or of bonds. And when it was told me how that the Jews laid wait for the man, I sent straightway to thee, and gave commandment to his accusers also to say before thee what they had against him. Farewell. 31 Then the soldiers, as it was commanded them, took Paul, and brought him by night to 32 Antipatris. On the morrow they left the horsemen to go with him, and returned to the

33 castle: who, when they came to Cæsarea, and delivered the epistle to the governor, presented Paul also before him. And when the governor had read the letter, he asked of what province he was. And when he understood that he was of Cilicia; I will hear thee, said he, when thine accusers are also come. And he commanded him to be kept in Herod’s judgment hall.

1. The Assertion with which Paul first breaks the Silence.—God had used the tribune Lysias (acting for the governor, Felix) to rescue Paul, and then, for his continued safety, to hold him in arrest. Now he makes of the tribune’s desire to know more of Paul a new opportunity for the apostle. This opportunity, like every circumstance and position in which Paul was placed during his period of liberty or of “bonds and imprisonment,” is made by him an occasion “for the furtherance of the gospel.”

The Council, or Sanhedrim, was assembled in a hall connected with the Temple chambers. (See diagram, Vol. I., p. 623.) Into this hall Paul was “brought down” from the castle. Here Lysias remained while the military guard retired a little distance, yet ready to interpose (as they did) for his protection. Almost twenty-five years had elapsed since Paul had intensely endorsed the Council’s murderous persecution of Stephen, and had been the chief instrument of this supreme judicatory in its vindictive pursuit of Christ’s disciples. Now he stands before them as the chief object of their hate, with no responsive hate; altogether unmindful of himself, calmly and undauntedly (“looking stedfastly,” Luke says) he studies their faces and their spirit.

Then he asserts a self-respecting dignity by opening the anomalous proceedings. He claims a position of perfect equality, by addressing them as Brother Men. He shows that he understood the tribune’s object by speaking of himself; and in Greek, that Lysias too might comprehend. As best answering a question touching his criminality, he affirms his own truthful and righteous life. In the spirit and manner of the Master’s question, “Who convinceth me of sin?” he challenges them to gain-say the assertion that he had been true to God and man; that in the main his aims, his plans, his deeds, had been single and right. Paul asserts no doctrine or practice of perfection here; but a fact based upon God’s gracious inworking. And he does it, not only to justify himself before Lysias, but to sharpen the contrast with their professed righteousness, which was hypocrisy. B.

2,3. The High Priest’s Unjust Command and Paul’s Indignant Rejoinder.—Ananias had been appointed high priest in A. D. 48. In A. D. 52 he was sent to Rome to answer before Claudius on a charge of oppression brought against him by the Samaritans. The result is doubtful; but the best solution seems to be that Ananias was not formally deposed, but, upon the murder of Jonathan (who had been appointed in his place during his suspension) in A. D. 57, he resumed his functions. The high priest’s character for violence and lawlessness suggests that a guilty conscience assumed the guise of zeal against blasphemy, when he ordered the bystanders to smite Paul on the mouth. S.—It was not to be tolerated that a man who stood arraigned there as an apostate from the religion of his fathers should assert his innocence. The mouth must be shut that uttered such a declaration. Hackett.

It was not the proposed indignity to himself (which, from the question of the bystanders, we may infer was not actually committed), but it was the glaring injustice and hypocrisy of the man who commanded it, that instantly turned the prisoner into a judge and condemner. But Paul’s words were not an imprecation, nor an outburst of passion, or even of righteous indignation. Severe as was the figure he used—thou whited wall—and sharply as the implied charge of falsehood was hurled back against the high priest, more severe was the whited sepulchre which Christ used, and more directly and sharply were His terrible denunciations pointed against hypocrites. Paul speaks, too, in God’s name; and he assigns the unlawful command of Ananias as the ground of this announced judgment from God. B.—On each of the many such hypocrites who sat before him, the apostle might well denounce the doom, “God shall smite thee”; and there is no difficulty in regarding the special fitness of his words to Ananias—who was deposed by Felix two years later and afterward murdered by the Sicarii—as one of the innumerable examples of unconscious prophecy. S.—Concerning Ananias, Josephus states that in a tumult begun by his own son he was besieged and taken in the royal palace, where having in vain attempted to hide himself in an old aqueduct, he was dragged out and slain, about five years after this. D.

4,5. The Bystanders’ Question and Paul’s Reply.—The partisans to whom the high priest’s unlawful command had been directed, seem to have been so far affected by Paul’s boldness as to substitute a rebuking question for the smiting on the mouth. In their question, however, they defended, not the unlawful order, but the sacred office of the high priest. They charge Paul with reviling God’s high priest.

In the apostle’s answering avowal of ignorance respecting Ananias and his high-priestly office, we find one of those Scriptural difficulties which has had many proposed solutions. It seems obvious that Paul did not speak ironically, or as confessing and apologizing for a heedless or intemperate exclamation. Nor did he have reference to the abolition of the priestly office by Christ. Still less did he mean to deny the title of Ananias on account of his suspension from and subsequent usurpation of the high priest’s functions. His supposed defect of vision seems also to be ruled out, by his “stedfast looking” at the outset, and by his clear discernment of the two main elements, Sadducaic and Pharisaic, comprised in the Council. Besides the established character of Paul for sincerity and for clearness of perception, there are natural considerations of fact which sustain the view that he honestly pleaded ignorance of the person of the high priest. Ananias had not succeeded to the office until ten or more years after Paul’s conversion. He was not necessarily the presiding officer of the Sanhedrim. Nor, when presiding, was it customary always to wear the distinctive robes of the high-priesthood. This was only demanded when performing official duties in the Temple.

Respecting this reply of Paul we note further: (1) That he simply justifies himself as to the charge of reviling brought against him. He does not withdraw nor apologize for the condemnation he had uttered against Ananias. That remained: its force and justness unshaken by the attempted diversion of the high priest’s adherents. (2) That Paul, by citing from the law (Ex. 22 : 28), distinctly implies that he still holds that law, which he is here charged with rejecting, as the guide and rule of his life. The quotation, thus regarded, further shows that the apostle in this whole colloquy was now speaking, as he declared he had lived, seriously and conscientiously.

6-9. Paul ends the Useless Conference by dividing his Adversaries. Strife between the Pharisees and Sadducees.—Knowing well that he can have neither fair hearing nor just judgment from a body so prejudiced and hostile, with no hope of achieving good by further direct exposition of Christian truth, he wisely and rightly divides his adversaries, and so abruptly breaks up an unsought, anomalous, and useless conference. Not as some mistakenly read it, by a trick suddenly conceived and carried out for his own advantage, but in a way that perfectly accords with the true missionary spirit and work. The state of dissension between these two great parties which for generations divided the nation had always been familiar to Paul. Nay, more, he had always sided with the Pharisees as respects their points of difference with the Sadducees. With them he had shared a belief and hope in the resurrection from the dead. Apprehending, as they did not, its ultimate relation to the risen Christ, he could truly declare that his preaching of this doctrine had subjected him to this inquisitorial process before the Sanhedrim. And now he uses this very examination to emphasize, and so call attention to, the great doctrine upon which the two rival sects were chiefly divided; knowing and designing, indeed, thereby to raise an issue that would break up the Council. B.

—He had not come to Jerusalem to escape out of the way of danger; but, at the risk of bonds and death, to reconcile the sincere Jews, if possible, to the gospel as the fulfillment of the Law. He desired to prove himself a faithful Israelite by his very testimony to him whom God had raised from the dead. Both these objects might naturally be promoted by an appeal to the nobler professions of the Pharisees, whose creed, as distinguished from that of the Sadducees, was still, as it had ever been, his own. Of that creed, faith in the risen Lord was the true fulfillment. He wished to lead his brother Pharisees into a deeper and more living apprehension of their own faith; and, seeing now the hopelessness of gaining over the Sadducees, he made a last appeal to the party of which there remained any hope. S.

He needed no expedient, for he was then in Roman hands and under Roman protection. It was no pretense to serve a turn; it was the genuine language of his heart. In all his other speeches at this crisis the same idea reigns predominant. “I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers: unto which promise our twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night, hope to come: for which hope’s sake, King Agrippa, I am accused of the Jews. Why is it judged by you a thing incredible if God raises the dead?” It is the self-same sound which we heard in the first discourse given us from his lips, when he cried to the Jews of the Pisidian Antioch, “Now we declare unto you glad tidings, how that the promise which was made unto the fathers, God hath fulfilled the same unto us their children, in that he hath raised up Jesus again.” And when we read his mind upon this subject more fully in 1 Cor. 15, and indeed in the whole of his writings, we see how truly the resurrection of Christ did, in his view, include the realization of all the hopes with which the Old Covenant was pregnant; how entirely it was to him the cause and actual commencement, as well as the pledge and promise, of the resurrection and the life to man. T. D. B.

8. The Sadducees believed in neither angel nor spirit; they rejected the doctrine of a future life, and denied the resurrection of the dead. They were the rationalists of their age. They accepted the law, admitted the Divine mission of Moses, and belonged to the Hebrew Church; but they did away with everything in the constitution of humanity and its relation to God which could sustain the edifice of anything like a high religious life. Eternal life, in the sense of a future immortality, was exploded altogether. T. B.

The immediate result was “a sudden paroxysm of their usual antipathy and party zeal,” an array of the two parties against each other, and an assumption, for the moment, of Paul’s defense by the more numerous party of the Pharisees. Seemingly referring to the apostle’s account on the preceding day of Christ’s two miraculous appearances, the Pharisaic scribes assert their belief that he is the true man he claims to be, and that a spirit (or angel) may have spoken to him, as he had said. True to their belief in spiritual messengers from heaven, using (if the sentence be genuine) the very words of Gamaliel (5 : 39), they declare that they will not fight against the God who sends spirits by harming this man to whom he may have sent them.

10. Paul’s Second Rescue from Actual Violence by the Tribune Lysias.**—The controversy between the rival sects grew so sharp, and the actual strife around the person of Paul became so fierce, that the Roman commander was constrained to interpose his soldiers again, and almost forcibly to withdraw his prisoner. Not that Paul, an obscure prisoner, was of any special account. But for the life of Paul, a Roman citizen, he would be held responsible. Besides, he has learned something, if not all he desires to know, about this man. What he has learned has satisfied him that his prisoner is no criminal and deserves no punishment from Jew or Roman. And all that he has heard and seen has greatly raised his estimate of Paul. It has prepared him to take the decisive and costly measures for Paul’s deliverance which follow in the history.

11. Another Night-vision of Christ.**—Once before, at Corinth, and once after, in his ocean peril, came such a divine personal visitation for the needed cheer and stay of Paul’s spirit, questioning about the present, and depressed concerning the future. Not for his own Christian comfort or peace in trusting; for his faith was adequate to his mere personal needs. But Christ came, partly to acquaint him that his work in Jerusalem was finished, and that it was approved; but chiefly to assure him concerning his longed-for work at Rome—to let him know that he should finish his course with joy, and the ministry received of the Lord Jesus (20 : 24). B.

So, then, he was to be guided by that unerring Hand, though by a path he had not proposed, to the goal he had so much desired; and we can understand the calmness which this assurance gave him amid the trials of the following years. S.—It upheld and comforted him in the uncertainty of his life from the Jews, in the uncertainty of his liberation from prison at Cesarea, in the uncertainty of his surviving the storm in the Mediterranean, in the uncertainty of his fate on arriving at Rome. So may one crumb of divine grace and help be multiplied to feed five thousand wants and anxieties. A.

12-35. Defeat of a Conspiracy to assassinate Paul by his Removal to Cesarea.**—The plot was well laid, and endorsed at least by the Sadducean members of the Sanhedrim. Such vows were not unusual with the Jews; and absolution was readily obtained if they were found impossible of accomplishment. The ready admission of Paul’s nephew, and the instant compliance with Paul’s request by the centurion, and further, the immediate audience and heed given by the tribune to the young messenger, show how strong an impression the apostle had made upon them. Both officers recognized and at once responded to his prompt judicious action. B.—

The details of his acting exhibit a decisive example of the actual union and harmony between the present purpose of God and the responsibility of men for duty on their own sphere. It was determined that Paul’s life should be saved from these dangers, and that determination was made known to him. He knew for certain that these schemers could not take his life; he knew for certain that the power of God was pledged effectually to frustrate their designs; yet with this knowledge Paul laid his plans skillfully, and executed them with secrecy and energy, for the preservation of his own life, precisely as if he had thought that all depended on his own skill and promptitude. This shows conclusively that in Paul’s mind a belief in the decrees of God did not conflict with the obligation to diligent duty on the part of men. He framed and conducted a counterplot to defeat the conspiracy of the Jewish priesthood with as much zeal and care as if he had not obtained previous assurance of his safety. This simple history is most precious as an inspired commentary on some difficult doctrines. It does not indeed make the doctrines easy of comprehension; it does not relieve them of mystery to our minds; but it is fitted to show us that no view of the divine purposes can be right that in any measure tends to slacken human zeal and energy. To be assured that it is God that worketh in them, is the best of all motives to induce intelligent Christians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2 : 12, 13). Arnot.

The Roman commander was fully aware that Paul’s life was not secure even in the citadel. B.—The crime of assassination had become fearfully frequent in Jerusalem. Neither the sanctity of the Temple protected the unsuspicious worshiper from the secret dagger, nor did the majesty of the high priest’s office secure the first religious and civil magistrate of the nation from the same ignoble

fate. Milman.—Hence the tribune Claudius Lysias, upon learning of the vow of these fanatic zealots against the apostle’s life, the same night sent his prisoner under a strong protecting guard to Felix, the procurator or governor (of the Imperial Province of Judea), who resided at Cesarea. B.