CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 30
Last Visit to Jerusalem
1. The voyage to Judaea
Among the travelling companions who joined paul in Corinth, or its Aegean port of Cenchreae, ready to sail with him to Judaea, Luke mentions Sopater of Beroea, the son of Pyrrhus; Aristarchus and Secundus from Thessalonica; Gaius of Derbe and Timothy (originally from Lystra), and Tychicus and Trophimus from the province of Asia1 (the latter of whom was a Gentile Christian from Ephesus).2 It would be unwise to attach sinister importance to the absence of a Corinthian name from Luke’s list. The list may not be exhaustive; it may be confined to those who had travelled to Corinth from other places to join Paul. Paul had been spending several weeks with Gaius, his host, and other Corinthian friends; moreover, he had just told the Roman Christians how Macedonia and Achaia had resolved to contribute to the Jerusalem relief fund.3 Achaia, for Paul, meant Corinth and the places around it, and there is no breath of a suggestion in his letter to the Romans that “Achaia” had not carried out its resolve. We should, indeed, consider the possibility that (in spite of some grumblings over Paul’s “craftiness”4 in sending Titus to help with the organizing of their contribution) the Corinthian church asked Titus to convey their gift to Jerusalem; if so, the omission of the name of Titus here is of a piece with its omission throughout the whole narrative of Acts.5
Most of the party set sail from Cenchreae at the appointed time, when the Aegean was open for navigation after the winter. Paul, however, got wind of a plot against his life on board the ship by which he had arranged to sail; accordingly, he changed his plans, went north to Philippi, and found a ship at Neapolis, the port of Philippi, bound for Troas, on which he and Luke embarked “after the days of Unleavened Bread” (Acts 20:6). In A.D. 57 the festival of Unleavened Bread fell probably during the week April 7–14.6 Paul hoped to be in Jerusalem for Pentecost, which would begin in the last week of May, but the realization of this hope would depend on the availability of suitable shipping.
They reached Troas in five days; the prevailing winds probably made the voyage longer than that from Troas to Neapolis which they had completed in two days about eight years previously.7 At Troas they found the rest of their company, who had sailed from Cenchreae, waiting for them; and there they remained for a week. Either the ship from Neapolis was going no farther than Troas, in which case they had to wait for a ship going in the direction they wished to take, or it was to sail farther south and call at various points along the west coast of Asia Minor, but had to stay some days at Troas (as it did also at some later ports of call) unloading its cargo and taking on a fresh one.
We are informed about the stages of this voyage in considerable detail, since the narrator himself was on board and kept a diary which was later embodied in the published edition of Acts.8
In Troas there was a small community of Christians, formed perhaps during Paul’s distracted and interrupted evangelization of the city and its neighbourhood a year or two before.9 Paul and his friends enjoyed the company of these Christians while they remained at Troas, especially during the evening before their departure (a Sunday), when they met to break bread and Paul went on talking to them until midnight. Luke remembered the occasion vividly because a young man of the community in Troas, Eutychus by name, was overcome by sleep while Paul was talking and fell down from the third-floor window-ledge where he had been sitting. He was knocked unconscious by the fall and his friends feared that he was dead, but Paul hurried downstairs and embraced him (perhaps applying some form of artificial respiration) and assured the others, to their great relief, that Eutychus was still alive.
Next day the ship set sail, with most of the company aboard (Luke included), but Paul went by land across the peninsula to Assos (Behramkale). Perhaps he wanted to delay his departure from Troas until the last minute to make sure that all was well with Eutychus, and then took a road which he knew from his previous visits to those parts, in the certainty that he would reach Assos in time to board the ship there, since it would have to round Cape Lectum (Bababurun).
At Assos, then (where the harbour, with its ancient breakwater, is still in use), he was taken on board, and the ship continued on its way, putting in at Mytilene (on the east coast of the island of Lesbos), then (after negotiating the channel between Chios and the Anatolian mainland) at Samos, and the following day at Miletus, on the south shore of the Latmian Gulf, at the mouth of the Maeander. (Between Samos and Miletus the Western text inserts a mention of the promontory of Trogyllium.)10
At Miletus the ship was due to stay in harbour for a few days, so Paul sent an urgent message to Ephesus, some thirty miles distant, asking the leaders of the church there to come and see him at Miletus. He could not risk going to Ephesus himself, as the ship might have left Miletus before his return. He had deliberately chosen to travel by a ship which made the straight run from Chios to Samos, across the mouth of the Ephesian Gulf, so as to be sure of reaching Jerusalem by Pentecost, if this were possible. At the same time he could not be so near as he was to Ephesus without making some effort to get in touch with his friends there.
Nothing is said of Christians in Miletus, although presumably, like other cities in the province, it had “heard the word of the Lord” in the course of Paul’s Ephesian ministry.11 The existence of a Jewish community in the city is attested by an inscription in the theatre, allocating a section of the seats to Jews and God-fearers.12
When the Ephesian leaders arrived Paul greeted them. Luke has preserved a summary of what he said to them—a summary of which Percy Gardner said that among all the Pauline discourses in Acts this “has the best claim of all to be historic”. While it is “altogether in the style of the writer of Acts”, yet, he said, it “offers phenomena which seem to imply that he was guided by memory in the composition”.13 Paul lays a solemn charge on his hearers, who are variously described as elders, shepherds and overseers (bishops),14 beseeching them to take care of their fellow-Christians and protect them against dangers which threatened them from without and within, following the example which Paul himself had set them during the years that he had spent with them. He himself would never see them again, but God would supply them with all the resources necessary for their pastoral ministry.
This is the only Pauline speech in Acts which is addressed to Christians, so it is not surprising that it presents, to a far greater degree than any of the other Pauline speeches, features of affinity with the letters of Paul. In particular, here only in Acts is explicit mention made of the saving efficacy of the death of Christ. “Feed the church of God”, says Paul, “which he purchased with the blood of his beloved one”15 (Acts 20:28). It is fruitless to argue that this is just a “turn of phrase” introduced by Luke “to give the speech a Pauline stamp”;16 the context in which the words appear confirms the judgment of C. F. D. Moule:
This is Paul, not some other speaker; and he is not evangelizing but recalling an already evangelized community to its deepest insights. In other words, the situation, like the theology, is precisely that of a Pauline epistle, not of preliminary evangelism.17
From Miletus the ship continued on its way to the islands of Cos and Rhodes in the Dodecanese, and then put in at Patara, a port on the Lycian coast of south-west Asia Minor.18 From here it may have been proceeding farther east along the south coast of the peninsula, but it could no longer serve the purpose of Paul and his companions, so they transferred at Patara to another ship bound for Phoenicia. This ship sailed in a south-easterly direction from Patara to Tyre, passing Cyprus on the port side, and laid up in the harbour at Tyre for seven days, while it discharged its cargo. At Tyre, as previously at Troas, the party seized the opportunity of fellowship with local Christians. The origins of the church of Tyre are nowhere expressly recorded, but they belong almost certainly to the evangelization of Phoenicia by dispersed Hellenistic Christians from Jerusalem after Stephen’s death.19 When the week was up, all the members of the Tyrian church, with their wives and children, escorted their temporary visitors to the beach, where they bade each other farewell with prayer.
Their next port of call was Ptolemais (Akko), where the ship which they had boarded at Patara may have reached its terminus. They spent a day with the church there, and then went on to Caesarea, whether by land or sea is not said explicitly. Probably they had several days in hand before the onset of Pentecost, so they were able to relax with their friends at Caesarea, after quite a tiring voyage, before going up to Jerusalem.
At Caesarea Paul had an opportunity of renewing old acquaintance and introducing his new friends to those whom he had known in earlier days. The Christian community in Caesarea had grown since the conversion of Cornelius and his household;20 it received an accession of strength when Philip the evangelist (one of the seven Hellenistic leaders in the Jerusalem church while Stephen was alive) made his home there and brought up his family of four gifted daughters, each one a prophet.21 (Half a century later, after Philip’s migration to Phrygia, some of his daughters lived on into old age and were highly reputed as informants on persons and events from the early days of Palestinian Christianity.)22
At the end of their stay in Caesarea they were accompanied by some of their fellow-believers from that city, and also by Mnason, a Cypriot by origin and a foundation-member of the mother church,23 who was to be their host in Jerusalem. It was important to find a Jerusalem Christian willing to be host to so many Gentile Christians, but Mnason, a Hellenist, readily undertook this ministry. Perhaps the Caesarean Christians made themselves responsible for this arrangement. If Mnason was in a position to accommodate the party during their visit to Jerusalem, the Jerusalem church was not completely denuded of Hellenists after the dispersion which followed Stephen’s death. To Jerusalem, then, they came, mounted perhaps on mules or donkeys24 (the distance from Caesarea is 64 miles or over 100 kilometres).
2. Premonitions of trouble
Before he started the voyage, Paul foresaw that this visit to Jerusalem would be fraught with hazards. The misgivings at which he hinted in his letter to the Romans were confirmed by prophetic utterances in one Christian community after another in the ports at which he and his companions put in during their voyage. “The Holy Spirit testifies in every city”, he told his Ephesian friends at Miletus, “that imprisonment and afflictions await me” (Acts 20:23). Some of the Christians at Tyre urged him “through the Spirit”—that is, under prophetic inspiration—“not to go on to Jerusalem” (Acts 21:4). And at Caesarea he had a visit from Agabus of Jerusalem, the prophet who, some twelve years earlier, had come to Antioch and foretold the famine that hit Palestine with special severity shortly afterwards. On this occasion Agabus, in the tradition of the great prophets of Israel, accompanied his prediction with a symbolic action (Acts 21:11):
he took Paul’s girdle and bound his own feet and hands, and said, “Thus says the Holy Spirit, ‘So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man who owns this girdle and deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles’.”
If his words have been precisely recorded, then they did not tally completely with the event: it was the Gentiles who bound Paul, after snatching him from his Jewish assailants. But their main drift was plain enough: Paul’s life would be endangered if he persisted in going on to Jerusalem. His friends therefore begged him to give up any thought of carrying out his plan to visit the city with the delegates of the Gentile churches; these could perfectly well hand over the gifts which they had brought, and their hospitality during their stay in Jerusalem was assured.
Paul, however, was as sure of divine guidance in resolving to go to Jerusalem as his friends and well-wishers were in beseeching him not to go. When they saw that his mind was made up, and that nothing would shift him, they left off trying to dissuade him and said “The Lord’s will be done” (Acts 21:14). In these words there may be an echo of Jesus’ submission to the will of God in Gethsemane25—a conscious echo, so far as Luke was concerned, for there is a recognizable literary parallel between his account of Jesus’ “setting his face to go to Jerusalem”26 in the first part of his history and Paul’s last journey to Jerusalem in the second part. To the repeated passion-predictions in the Gospel correspond the repeated forecasts of trouble for Paul in Acts, and in both sequences there is the same insistence on the fulfilment of the divine purpose.27 Thus Luke’s emphasis on Paul’s “going to Jerusalem under the constraint of the Spirit” (Acts 20:22) is consistent with Paul’s contemplation of his visit to Jerusalem in Romans 15:15–32 as something which was necessary to seal “the priestly service of the gospel of God” which he had discharged thus far.
3. James and the elders
Paul had asked the Roman Christian to join him in praying that the relief fund which he had organized for Jerusalem might be “acceptable to the saints” (Romans 15:32). This prayer at least appears to have met with an affirmative answer.28 Writing as one of Paul’s companions, Luke says that the brethren in Jerusalem gave them a cordial welcome. The day after their arrival in the city (Acts 21:18–20):
Paul went in with us to James; and all the elders were present. After greeting them, he related one by one the things that God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry. And when they heard it, they glorified God.
So well they might, for what Paul told them by word of mouth was corroborated by the presence of so many of his Gentile converts, representatives of hundreds if not thousands more; it was corroborated also (although Luke, for reasons best known to himself, passes this over in silence)29 by the gifts which, presumably on this occasion, they handed over to James and his fellow-elders on behalf of the churches which they represented.
On earlier occasions when the church of Jerusalem figures in any detail in Paul’s letters or Luke’s narrative, the apostles, or some of them, play a leading part; this time they are conspicuously absent. Probably Peter and his colleagues had left Jerusalem to engage in missionary activity in the lands of the Jewish dispersion, leaving the mother-church to be cared for by James the Just and a college of elders—perhaps the sanhedrin of the true remnant of Israel, as they considered themselves to be. If James occupied the position of primus inter pares among them that the high priest occupied in the official Sanhedrin, this might account for the later legend that he wore garments of priestly type and had the right to enter the sanctuary.30
While James and his colleagues greeted Paul as a brother and were impressed by the record of his achievement among the Gentiles, they were afraid that his presence in Jerusalem might be the signal for trouble. Apart from the hostility which was inevitably felt towards such a renegade by the Jewish religious establishment, many members of the church, described as “zealots for the law” (Acts 21:20), disapproved of his missionary policy and of the freedom with which he treated the law and the traditions of Israel. It was bad enough that he should so resolutely refuse to impose the law and the traditions on his Gentile converts, but it was rumoured that he even advised Jewish Christians of the dispersion to cease observing their ancestral customs, including the circumcision of their children. James and the other elders appear not to have believed these rumours and indeed, while it is easy to see what gave rise to them, it is equally easy to see that they were distortions of the truth. Some people cannot readily distinguish between the essential and the non-essential: if they abandon an old order for a new one, they feel it necessary to give up everything associated with the old order—neutral or even helpful features as well as others. But this is to exchange a positive form of legal obligation for a negative form. Thus, at the opposite extreme from those Jewish Christians in Jerusalem who followed the ancient customs as a matter of course there may have been others elsewhere who discontinued them on principle. Paul’s policy was different from both. Truly emancipated souls are not in bondage to their emancipation. Paul conformed to the customs or departed from them according to the company, Jewish or Gentile, in which he found himself from time to time, making the interests of the gospel the supreme consideration.31 In Jewish company he would naturally observe the Jewish food laws, from common courtesy, not to speak of Christian charity, nor would he outrage Jewish sentiment by violating the sanctity of holy days, however much for his own part he esteemed all days alike.32 True, he was dismayed when he heard that his Galatian converts had begun to “observe days, and months, and seasons, and years” (Galatians 4:10); but they were Gentiles, and had no good reason for adopting the Jewish sacred calendar, least of all for adopting it by way of religious obligation. Once Paul had himself inherited the observance of that calendar by way of religious obligation, but he had learned as a Christian to enjoy complete freedom with regard to its observance or non-observance.
It is certain that in Jerusalem, of all places, he would live as a practising Jew, if only out of consistency with his declared policy, to “give no offence to Jews or to Greeks or to the church of God” and to “try to please all men in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of the many, that they may be saved” (1 Corinthians 10:32 f.). There were few “Greeks” in Jerusalem, but both the Jews and the church of God in that city would be scandalized if he failed to observe the “customs”.
But if Paul claimed liberty of action for himself in such matters, why would he deny it to other Jewish Christians? Provided they shared his attitude to the traditional practices of Israel as no longer divine requirements but as voluntary actions which might be undertaken or omitted as expediency directed, they might freely go on with them. It was no more necessary for them than for Paul to be in bondage to their emancipation. If they wished, for what seemed to them to be good and proper reasons, to circumcise their children, Paul would remember that he had circumcised Timothy for what seemed to himself to be good and proper reasons.33 His letters give us no indication of his advice in these respects to Jewish Christians, except that Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians alike should respect each other’s scruples—or lack of scruples.
Not that the leaders of the Jerusalem church would have been altogether happy about Paul’s libertarian attitude to these questions; they would probably have disapproved of Jewish Christians who voluntarily discontinued the “customs”. They felt that they themselves had made all the concession that was called for in the Jerusalem decree which exempted Gentile Christians from circumcision, while stipulating a certain minimum of “necessary things” which they should observe.34 Of this concession they now reminded Paul, as though to reassure him that they had no thought of imposing the “customs” on his Gentile converts.35 (The possibility should be recognized that they were perhaps insufficiently informed regarding Paul’s increasing reservations about the Jerusalem decree.)36
As for the rumours and misrepresentations which were circulating about Paul in Jerusalem, they had a practical proposal to put to him—one which, they hoped, would effectively squash them. Four members of the church had undertaken a Nazirite vow, and the time had now come to discharge it. This involved the cutting or shaving of their hair, which had been allowed to grow long for the duration of the vow, and the presentation of an appropriate offering in the temple.37 There were some unspecified circumstances which made it necessary for them to undergo ceremonial purification before their vow could be discharged; this purification involved the delay of a week.38 If Paul would associate himself with these men, share in their purificatory ceremony and pay the expenses incurred in the discharge of their vow, this would be a demonstration to all that he was a practising Jew.
Paul probably did not share the optimistic naïveté of his Jerusalem brethren, but if the course of action they suggested would save them from the embarrassment of being associated in the public eye with such a dubious character as he was reputed to be, there was no reason why he should not fall in with their plan. There is no ground for the idea that they pressed it on Paul as a subtle way of humiliating him.39 As for the propriety of a Nazirite vow, he himself had undertaken one at Corinth five years before.40 To pay the expenses of others who had undertaken such a vow was regarded as an act of pious charity;41 certainly neither Paul nor (probably) the four Nazirites took part in this ceremony as a means of acquiring merit before God. It was an outward and visible sign of thanksgiving to God for answered prayer.
4. Paul taken into custody
Whatever effect Paul’s visit to the temple with the four Nazirites had on the many “zealots for the law” in the church of Jerusalem, it brought Paul himself into the very danger against which he had been forewarned by friends in Tyre, Caesarea and elsewhere. Pentecost was coming on, and Jews from the dispersion had arrived in Jerusalem to celebrate the festival. Among them were some Jews from Ephesus and the neighbourhood, who had come to know Paul well by sight during his residence in proconsular Asia, and who disapproved of him and all his works. They had seen him in Jerusalem with an Ephesian whom they recognized—Trophimus, one of his Gentile converts. Now, at the end of the Nazirites’ week of purification, they found Paul in the temple precincts with them—presumably in the Court of Israel42—and raised a hue and cry against him, charging him with violating the sanctity of the temple by taking Gentiles within forbidden bounds.
The outer court of the temple, enclosed by Herod the Great, was called the court of the Gentiles because Gentiles were free to enter it. This was the area which Jesus had “cleansed” during Holy Week, in protest against those encroachments upon it which diminished its use as “a house of prayer for all the nations” (Mark 11:15–17). But Gentiles were prohibited, on pain of death, from trespassing beyond the barrier which separated the outer court from the inner courts, the sacred area proper. Inscriptions in Greek and Latin were fastened at intervals to this barrier, warning Gentile visitors against proceeding farther.43 This was the one type of offence for which the Romans allowed the Jewish authorities to retain capital jurisdiction; they authorized the death penalty in this regard even when the offender was a Roman citizen, so careful were they to conciliate Jewish religious susceptibilities.44 Had there been any foundation for the charge against Paul, his Roman citizenship would not have saved him from the consequences.
The immediate result of the Asian Jews’ outcry was that the surrounding crowd turned on Paul and dragged him out of the court of Israel down into the outer court, where they continued to beat him up. The temple police closed the gates leading from the outer court into the inner courts, so that the sanctity of the sacred area might not be outraged by the crowd’s unseemly violence. In the outer court Paul could not have survived the violence long, but timely action was taken by the Roman garrison posted in the Antonia fortress, which overlooked the temple precincts from the north-west and communicated with the outer court by two flights of steps.45 As soon as the military tribune in charge of the garrison got wind of the tumult, which was now spreading into the city, he sent a detachment of soldiers down the steps into the midst of the rioters; they dragged Paul away from his assailants and carried him shoulder-high back up the steps, to prevent the assailants from pulling him down. At the top of the steps stood the military tribune, Claudius Lysias by name, who formally arrested Paul and ordered him to be handcuffed to two soldiers and taken into the fortress.
It was impossible to make sense of the crowd’s excited accusations, but Paul had plainly done something to infuriate the people. The tribune jumped to the conclusion that he was an Egyptian adventurer who, some three years before, had appeared in Jerusalem claiming to be a prophet, and led a band of followers to the Mount of Olives. There he told them to wait until, at his word of command, the walls of Jerusalem would fall down flat; then they would march in, overthrow the Roman garrison and take possession of the city. The procurator Felix sent a body of troops against them who killed some, took others prisoner, and dispersed the rest. The Egyptian discreetly vanished.46 The feelings of those whom he had duped would not be friendly towards him; now, thought the tribune, he had reappeared and the people were venting their rage on him.
He was therefore surprised when Paul, before he could be taken into the fortress, addressed him in educated Greek and asked permission to speak to the crowd. Paul assured him that he was no Egyptian, but a Jew from Tarsus, “a citizen of no mean city” (Acts 21:39). The tribune gave him the permission which he sought, and from his vantage-point at the top of the steps, flanked by the soldiers to whom he was handcuffed, Paul secured the crowd’s attentive silence for a time by addressing them in their Aramaic vernacular.
He told them of his own zeal for God and strict devotion to the ancestral law, and explained why he had adopted the course which he now followed. As his speech is summarized by Luke, it emphasizes those aspects in Paul’s story which might make a special appeal to such hearers—his upbringing in Jerusalem, his education at the feet of Gamaliel, his fanatical persecution of “the Way”, the part played in his conversion and call by Ananias of Damascus, “a devout man according to the law”, and the subsequent confirmation of his call in the Jerusalem temple itself, where the risen Lord appeared to him in a vision and sent him “far away to the Gentiles” (Acts 22:3–21).47
At this last word the crowd remembered its grievance and the hubbub broke out afresh, so that the tribune, despairing of finding out the cause of the trouble except by examining his prisoner under torture, had Paul taken into the fortress and gave orders for him to be scourged. Both Greek and Roman legal systems had the idea that people were more likely to tell the truth under torture, or the threat of it, but Greek law generally exempted freemen from such treatment, and Roman law exempted Roman citizens. Accordingly, as Paul was being tied up for the lash, he asked the centurion in charge of the operation if it was permissible to scourge a Roman citizen, especially one against whom no crime had been proved in open court. The centurion suspended the arrangements for scourging and went to the tribune with the news that the man was a Roman citizen. The tribune, in some alarm, sent in haste to ask Paul if this was true. On being assured that it was, the tribune looked at him doubtfully. “I know how much it cost me to acquire the citizenship”, he said—perhaps with the implication that Paul, who must by now have presented a very dishevelled appearance, did not look as if he had one denarius to rub against another. “Ah”, said Paul; “I was born a citizen.” The tribune was duly impressed.48
A Roman citizen must be treated in accordance with due legal procedure. Evidently Paul was being charged with an offence against Jewish law, and the Sanhedrin was the proper body to deal with such an offence. Paul, therefore was brought before the Sanhedrin, which was presided over at this time by a high priest of very doubtful reputation, Ananias the son of Nedebaeus (A.D. 47–58).49 But until a charge was formally made and it was ascertained whether or not the Sanhedrin had jurisdiction in the case, the tribune maintained his responsibility for Paul. If witnesses had come forward to say that they had seen Paul take a Gentile into the inner courts, then the case would certainly have fallen within the competence of the Sanhedrin—but throughout the long drawn out proceedings, from first to last, no such witnesses were forthcoming. Paul might declare that in Christ the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile had been broken down,50 but he knew that the material wall of partition in the temple still stood, and he would have thrown away his hopes of getting safely out of Jerusalem and visiting Rome and Spain if he had done such a crazy thing as the Asian Jews alleged when they raised the hue and cry against him.51
Since no accusers presented themselves before the Sanhedrin at this stage, Paul took the opportunity to say a word himself. He started off inauspiciously, with a rebuke to the high priest for conduct unbefitting the president of the supreme court of Israel, but when he had apologized to the dignitary (if not to the man),52 he began again and enlisted the good will of the Pharisaic members of the court by declaring that the whole issue on which he stood before them rested on the hope of resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus, authenticated to Paul on the Damascus road when he received the call to his present ministry, was bound up in his mind with the general hope of resurrection which he shared with all the Pharisees. In the absence of a clear charge against Paul on which they could adjudicate, the Sadducees and Pharisees in the Sanhedrin fell to arguing about the resurrection, the Pharisees feeling that a man who was so sound on this fundamental doctrine could not be altogether bad.
5. Paul sent to Caesarea
At last the tribune, finding that no progress was being made with his problem of how to deal with this inconvenient Roman citizen, had him taken back to the fortress. Meanwhile Paul’s enemies, seeing that there was no legal way of getting him into their hands, plotted to assassinate him next time he was brought before the Sanhedrin. Paul’s nephew learned about this plot—this is the only reference we have in any New Testament document to any relative of Paul, and a tantalizingly fleeting one it is53—and obtained access to Paul in the fortress and told him what was afoot. Paul arranged for him to tell the tribune what he had discovered. This made the tribune’s mind up. He could no longer take personal responsibility for Paul’s safety. There were issues here with which he could not cope: if any one was to cope with them, let it be the provincial governor.
Accordingly he sent Paul off by night, under armed guard, to Caesarea, where the governor had his headquarters. When the party reached Antipatris (Rosh haʿAyin) next morning, the foot-soldiers returned, leaving seventy light-armed cavalry to escort Paul on the remaining 27 miles to Caesarea. With Paul the tribune sent a letter to the governor, explaining the circumstances and representing his own rôle in the best light: he had rescued Paul from his assailants in the temple, he said, “having learned that he was a Roman citizen” (Acts 23:27).
Rome: Appian Way (see p. 374)
Rome: Inscriptions from the Church of St. Praxedis and the Church of St. Sebastian (see p. 452)
The governor read the letter, asked Paul which province he came from, and had him kept in custody in his headquarters at Caesarea—the official praetorium which had been built by Herod as his palace. The governor himself would henceforth take charge of the proceedings.54
Paul had good reason to ask for the prayers of the Roman Christians that he might “be delivered from the unbelievers in Judaea” (Romans 15:31). Delivered he was, but in circumstances which involved the loss of his freedom for the next four years at least, and the postponement of his plan to visit Rome. So ended his last visit to Jerusalem.