CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 31
Caesarea and the Appeal to Caesar
1. Paul and Felix
Caesarea, where paul was to spend the next two years, was built by Herod the Great between 20 and 9 B.C., on the site formerly called Strato’s Tower, in order to serve as the principal Mediterranean port of his kingdom. Because of the lack of natural harbours along the coast south of the Bay of Haifa, he had an elaborate artificial harbour constructed here, enclosed by a semicircular breakwater, together with several other installations (excavated in 1956 and the following years) such as the temple of Augustus (in whose honour the city received its name), a magnificent theatre and a hippodrome.1 From the outset it was a predominantly Gentile city, and for this reason the Roman governors of Judaea from A.D. 6 onwards found it a more congenial place for their normal residence than Jerusalem. Herod’s palace in Caesarea served them as their headquarters (praetorium). The name of an earlier governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilate, was found in a Latin inscription in the theatre when it was being excavated in 1961; there Pilate’s official title is given as “prefect” (praefectus).2 It has been thought that the title procurator came to be used of the governor of Judaea from A.D. 44 onwards (although procurator is the title which Tacitus gives to Pilate).3
The procurator who took Paul into custody at Caesarea, Marcus Antonius Felix, was not the typical Roman provincial governor. Prefects or procurators of third-grade provinces like Judaea belonged regularly to the equestrian order (whereas proconsuls of senatorial provinces and legates of imperial provinces were drawn from the nobility, the senatorial order). But Felix was a freedman (libertus), who had once been a slave in the household of Antonia, daughter of Mark Antony and Octavia, widow of Drusus (Tiberius’s brother) and mother of the Emperor Claudius. His brother Pallas, who was likewise one of Antonia’s emancipated slaves, rose to a position of high responsibility and opportunity under Claudius, as chief accountant of the public treasury (praepositus a rationibus)—chancellor of the exchequer, one might say. It could well have been his influence that helped to procure for Felix the governorship of Judaea,4 but Felix had considerable native ability, coupled with personal qualities which won for him the entrée into the most exalted families. Each of his three successive wives was of royal birth: one was a granddaughter of Antony and Cleopatra,5 and his third wife, whom he had married by the time his path crossed Paul’s, was Drusilla, the youngest daughter of Herod Agrippa the elder and sister of Agrippa II and Bernice.
From a statement of Tacitus it has been inferred that before being appointed to succeed Ventidius Cumanus as procurator of Judaea in A.D. 52, Felix had occupied an administrative post under Cumanus in Samaria (which was part of the province of Judaea).6 During this period he seems to have won the confidence of Jonathan, the son of Ananus (Annas), an influential ex-high priest, who pressed for Felix’s appointment as procurator of Judaea when he was in Rome on a deputation to voice Jewish grievances against Cumanus.7 It is to Tacitus that Felix owes the unfavourable reputation of having “exercised the power of a king with the mind of a slave”;8 but allowance must be made for the prejudice with which Tacitus would contemplate the exaltation of a man of such humble origins. Felix’s entry upon his procuratorship of Judaea coincided with the emergence of a new body of terrorists (alias freedom fighters), the sicarii or dagger-men, who mingled with crowds at festivals and the like and stabbed Jewish “collaborationists” and others of whom they disapproved. One of their first victims was the ex-high priest Jonathan.9 The ruthless vigour with which Felix put down these and other liberationist movements raised his credit in Rome, and even when Pallas fell from favour in the imperial household in A.D. 55, shortly after Nero’s accession,10 Felix remained in office in Judaea for four more years.
This, then, was the man to whom Paul was sent by the military tribune in Jerusalem, and who henceforth had the responsibility of investigating the complaints against him.
Proceedings against Paul were now taken up by the Sanhedrin. Five days after Paul’s arrival in Caesarea, a deputation from that body came down to state their case before Felix. With them they brought an orator named Tertullus to present it in the conventional terms of forensic rhetoric. Luke quotes the exordium of Tertullus’s speech rather fully; it is a fair example of the captatio beniuolentiae employed in addressing such an official (Acts 24:2 ff.):
Your excellency! It is thanks to you that we enjoy unbroken peace; it is due to your provident care that, in every way and in every place, improvements are made for the good of this nation. We welcome this, sir, most gratefully. And now, not to take up your valuable time, I crave your indulgence for a brief statement of our case.
Then followed the indictment, asserting, as it passed from the more general to the more particular, that Paul was a perfect plague, a fomenter of discord among Jews throughout the Roman Empire, and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes,11 and that he had attempted to profane the temple. He was caught in the act while committing this last offence, but when the Jewish authorities had arrested him in accordance with their special jurisdiction in such matters, the military tribune had, with unwarranted force, snatched him from their hands.12
It is doubtful if the procurator of Judaea had any competence to take up the general complaints, which were probably designed to prejudice his mind against Paul. The particular charge of temple profanation was a grave one, but there was a serious defect in its presentation: no witnesses were produced to substantiate it. Paul was not slow to point this out when Felix invited him to reply to the accusations (Acts 24:10 ff.):
Realizing that you have been governing this nation for many years, I make my defence with confidence. As you may ascertain, it is not more than twelve days since I went up to worship at Jerusalem. They did not find me disputing with any one or stirring up a crowd, either in the temple or in the synagogues or anywhere in the city. Neither can they produce evidence for the charges which they now bring against me. This much I admit: according to the Way—the “sect” of which they speak—I worship the God of our fathers. I believe everything laid down in the law or written in the prophets, sharing the same hope in God as my accusers cherish, that there will be a resurrection of just and unjust alike. So I always train myself to maintain a clear conscience before God and men.
After an absence of several years I came to bring alms and offerings for my nation. They found me in the temple purified, discharging this service, without any crowd or disturbance. But it was some Jews from the province of Asia who stirred up the trouble, and they ought to be here before you to state whatever charge they have to lay against me. In their default, let my accusers themselves say of what offence they found me guilty when I was brought before the Sanhedrin, unless it lay in my open assertion as I stood among them: “the real issue of my trial before you today is the resurrection of the dead”.
If Paul drew attention to the absence of the potential witnesses for the prosecution, the procurator decided that another material witness was absent, from whom he might expect a more impartial account than the accusers or the defendant were likely to give. Accordingly, having listened to the Sanhedrin’s charge and to Paul’s reply, he adjourned proceedings—perhaps with the Latin formula Amplius: “When Lysias the tribune comes down”, he said, “I will decide your case.”
Luke’s formulation of Paul’s defence contains the only reference to the Jerusalem relief fund in the record of Acts, and includes some other features of interest. Apart from the insistence that no evidence was produced to substantiate the allegation that he had violated the sanctity of the temple, the contents of the speech might well have a greater relevance to Paul’s later appearance before the supreme tribunal in Rome than to his present appearance before the procurator of Judaea, and the same thing might indeed be said of the more general terms of Tertullus’s indictment. This raises the long-debated question of the relation between Acts and Paul’s trial in Rome. If it can no longer be held that Luke actually wrote his record to brief the counsel for the defence, or otherwise to serve as a document in the case,13 the possibility remains that some material of this kind was used as source-material in the composition of Acts. Charges, expressed or implied, that Paul was a disturber of the peace in the provinces, that he had diverted to a sectarian interest money which ought to have gone to the maintenance of the temple or to the relief of the Judaeans as a whole, and that he was propagating a new cult which (despite Gallio’s ruling) had no right to share the protection extended by Roman law to the Jewish religion, would have been relevant indeed in a hearing before the emperor, however little they may have fallen within the jurisdiction of Felix.
We may suppose that Felix did hold a further hearing at which Claudius Lysias was present to give his evidence, although no record of it has been preserved. Even so, nothing that Claudius Lysias could have said would have helped the case against Paul, and if Felix had had regard simply to the legalities of the situation, he might have discharged Paul there and then. But he postponed such action—hoping, says Luke, that Paul (or his associates) might try to persuade him by bribery to do what it was in any case his duty to do. The fact that Paul had so recently come to Jerusalem with “alms and offerings” may have suggested to Felix that Paul had access to sources of supply from which Felix himself might derive some financial profit. Stringent as Roman laws against bribery were,14 they were not sufficient to make many provincial governors resist the opportunities for quick enrichment which their office presented, and Felix was not the man to let such opportunities pass—modest as they were in comparison with those which his brother Pallas was able to exploit in Rome.15 His hopes of a bribe from Paul or his friends, however, were not realized, so Paul remained undischarged.
2. Paul’s associates
Meanwhile, it may be asked, what happened to the Gentile Christians who had accompanied Paul to Jerusalem? Two of them seem to have stayed on in Judaea, Luke and Aristarchus; perhaps they went to Caesarea so as to be near Paul and perform what services they could for him.16 The others probably made their way home as quickly and unobtrusively as they could: the turn of events which they had witnessed in Jerusalem may well have frustrated the realization of Paul’s hopes that his Gentile churches would find that the collection forged a bond of affection between them and their Judaean brethren. Whether the Judaean brethren in their turn felt more closely drawn to their Gentile fellow-Christians “because of the surpassing grace of God” manifested in their generous gift (2 Corinthians 9:14) we have no means of knowing.
Neither have we any means of knowing if the Jerusalem church or its leaders exerted themselves at all on Paul’s behalf when they saw the predicament into which their well-meant counsel had brought him. Probably they felt relieved when they heard that he had been taken to Caesarea. This last visit of Paul’s to Jerusalem had followed the pattern of earlier visits: trouble had broken out once more. It would really be best if Paul never came to Jerusalem again. Now that he was in Caesarea, under Roman guard, he was probably out of immediate danger, but in any case there was little that they could do for him. Moreover, the high priest and Sanhedrin were engaged in prosecuting him, and it would be unwise to do anything which might unnecessarily attract their hostile attention. It is easy to credit the Jerusalem church and its leaders with unworthy motives, but some attempt should be made to appreciate the extremely difficult situation in which they found themselves. If they still took seriously their commission to evangelize their fellow-Jews (and there is no reason to suppose that they had ceased to do so), any public association with Paul would have been a major handicap to its prosecution. It is possible, indeed, that this association was one of the grounds for the illegal execution of James the Just at the instance of the high priest Ananus II during the interregnum in the procuratorship which followed the death of Festus (A.D. 62).17
3. Two years in Caesarea
As for Paul himself, there are several scholars who hold that it was from Caesarea that some, if not all, of his “captivity epistles” were sent.18 We have seen that an Ephesian provenance has been postulated for some of them;19 but whereas an Ephesian imprisonment is but an inference (however reasonable) from ambiguous data, there is no doubt that Paul did undergo an imprisonment in Caesarea. In Philippians 1:13 he says that it has become known throughout the whole praetorium that his imprisonment is for Christ’s sake. He was certainly kept under guard in the praetorium at Caesarea, and this might be the praetorium which he mentions in writing to the Philippians; however, praetorium is a word with several meanings. Apart from its use to designate the praetorian guard in Rome, it meant the commanding officer’s headquarters in a military camp, or the headquarters of a provincial governor (like the legate of Syria or the procurator of Judaea) who had troops under his command. It does not seem to have been used of the proconsular headquarters in a province like Asia which had no standing army.20
As for the other group of captivity epistles—Philemon, Colossians and Ephesians—we have to consider Paul’s request to Philemon to get the guest-room ready for him, since he hopes to be released and to pay him a visit:21 is it likely that he thought of going back to proconsular Asia if he were set free from his Caesarean imprisonment? It is just conceivable, if he thought of taking the long land-route to Rome, instead of the more direct sea-route, but not very probable. Reference has been made above to the “unnecessary supposition” that it was at Ephesus that Aristarchus was his fellow-prisoner, as he calls him in Colossians 4:10.22 Since he appears to have been with Paul at Caesarea, was it there that he shared his imprisonment? Possibly; but he went in due course with Paul to Rome, and could have shared his imprisonment there.
All that Luke tells us of Paul’s tedious period of custody in Caesarea is that from time to time Felix called him to his presence for conversation. For, strange as it appears, Felix, according to Luke, had “a rather accurate knowledge of the Way” (Acts 24:22). Nothing that is otherwise known about Felix prepares the reader for this statement, but it must be linked with his marriage to the youngest daughter of the elder Herod Agrippa. Indeed, the Western text says quite explicitly that it was Felix’s wife “who asked to see Paul and hear him speak, so wishing to satisfy her he summoned Paul”.
At this time Drusilla was not yet twenty years old. As a small girl she had been betrothed to the crown prince of Commagene, but the marriage did not take place because he refused to embrace Judaism. Then her brother, the younger Agrippa, gave her in marriage to Azizus, king of Emesa (Homs) in Syria, who was prepared to make the necessary sacrifice. But when she was still only sixteen, Felix—with the help, says Josephus, of a Cypriot magician named Atomos—persuaded her to leave her husband and become his third wife. (There was no question of his becoming a Jew in order to marry her.)23 She bore Felix one son, Agrippa by name, who met his death in the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79.24
Thus summoned to take part in religious discussion with this extraordinary couple, Paul not only expounded the Christian faith and its relation to Judaism but also emphasized the ethical implications of his message—righteousness, self-control and future judgment. When Felix felt that the conversation was taking too personal a turn for his comfort, he dismissed Paul for the time being, but recalled him repeatedly—perhaps as a change from the boredom of official life. Caesarea, we may suppose, did not provide much in the way of diversion, but the acrimonious communal strife between its Jewish and Gentile residents gave him increasing trouble, and led at last to his recall.
Although Caesarea had the constitution of a Gentile city, its Jewish residents believed that they were entitled to isopoliteia—equal civic rights with their Gentile neighbours—because the city’s royal founder was a Jew. The dispute about these rights led to rioting between the two communities, and when Felix’s troops intervened to put down the rioting, they did so in a way which, the Jews believed, favoured the Gentile cause against theirs. This exacerbated the strife, and Felix sent the leaders of the two communities to Rome to make their representations before the emperor. The upshot was that the Jews’ claim to isopoliteia was disallowed25—a grievance which became one of the factors leading to the Jewish revolt against Rome in A.D. 66—but at the beginning of the investigation Felix was summoned to Rome and relieved of his procuratorship. He suffered nothing worse than this because of the continuing influence of his brother Pallas who, although he had been dismissed from the civil service four years previously, retained considerable personal power because of his great wealth and his contacts with the people who mattered.26
Felix had earned the disapproval of the Jews in his province for a variety of reasons and, most recently, for what was interpreted as his anti-Jewish action in Caesarea. There was not much he could do to redress the balance, but at least he need not annoy the Sanhedrin gratuitously by releasing Paul. “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend” was an argument which had been used effectively with one of his predecessors,27 so Felix, “desiring to do the Jews a favour, left Paul in prison” (Acts 24:27).
4. A new procurator
Felix was succeeded as procurator by Porcius Festus,28 who inherited the responsibility of coming to a decision about Paul. He was probably quite inexperienced in Jewish affairs and, unlike Felix, he had no Jewish wife through whom he could acquire “a rather accurate knowledge of the Way”. The new governor’s inexperience could easily be exploited to Paul’s disadvantage, especially if he endeavoured at the outset of his period of office to establish good relations with the high priest and Sanhedrin. This was precisely what Festus did. A few days after his arrival in Judaea he went up to Jerusalem to make their acquaintance, and after the appropriate exchange of civilities they raised the question of Paul (no doubt among other matters which Felix had left in an unsatisfactory state). Festus agreed to re-open the case, so a deputation from the Sanhedrin came down to Caesarea to restate their charges against Paul. As before Felix, so now before Festus, Paul returned a direct negative to each of their charges. His situation was precarious. If the governor found that a prima facie case had been made out against him on the ground of sacrilege, he might have been handed over forthwith to the Sanhedrin’s jurisdiction. The governor’s imperium was such that he was not necessarily bound by his predecessor’s finding, even if that finding had been placed on record. But Paul’s accusers probably overplayed their hand by charging him further (as they had done before Felix) with offences against the imperial peace; this was something which belonged to Roman jurisdiction and not to theirs.
However, in his desire to ingratiate himself with the Jewish leaders, Festus proposed to transfer the inquiry to Jerusalem, where the alleged sacrilege had been committed; he himself would continue to keep it under his own control. He no doubt regarded this as a reasonable proposal, but Paul did not think it reasonable at all. If Festus began by making one concession to the Sanhedrin, he might well go on to make more, and each concession would expose Paul to further peril. Festus might even treat the Sanhedrin as his consilium, his ad hoc advisory body, as his imperium entitled him to do.29 There was one course open to Paul as a Roman citizen to avoid this particular peril, even if it was a course which might be attended by perils of its own. It was not, he assured Festus, that he wished to circumvent the law of Rome or escape the due reward of anything he had done. If he were in fact guilty of a capital crime, as his accusers maintained, he was prepared to suffer the supreme penalty; but if there was no substance in their charges, he must not be placed in their power. Let Roman justice decide. As Festus was Caesar’s representative, the tribunal before which Paul stood was Caesar’s, but since Paul had not sufficient confidence in the provincial tribunal, he appealed to the supreme tribunal: “I appeal to Caesar”, he declared (Acts 25:11).
5. Appeal to Caesar
The citizen’s right of appeal (prouocatio) to the emperor appears to have developed from the earlier right of appeal in republican times to the sovereign Roman people. According to Dio Cassius,30 Octavian in 30 B.C. was granted the right to judge on appeal (ekklēton dikazein, in which A. H. M. Jones recognized the Greek equivalent of ex prouocatione cognoscere).31 It was in this period, too, that the lex Iulia de ui publica (mentioned above) was enacted.32 This law forbade any magistrate vested with imperium or potestas to kill, scourge, chain or torture a Roman citizen, or even to sentence him aduersus prouocationem (“in the face of an appeal”) or prevent him from going to Rome to lodge his appeal there within a fixed time.33 Professor Jones concluded that, from the date of this enactment, a Roman citizen anywhere in the empire was protected against summary magisterial punishment (coercitio), although the provincial magistrate might deal with cases which involved a plain breach of established statute law (which Paul’s case manifestly did not).34 By the beginning of the second century A.D. it evidently became the regular practice for Roman citizens in the provinces, charged with offences extra ordinem (not covered by the standard code of procedure), to be sent to Rome almost automatically, without going through the formality of appealing to Caesar.35 But there seems to have been a gradual erosion of the citizen’s privileges with the steady increase in the number of citizens throughout the empire as the second century advanced36—a tendency which reached its climax in A.D. 212 with the extension of the franchise to all freeborn provincials under Caracalla. In this as in other respects, when we think historically and not theologically, the picture given in Acts is true to the dramatic date of the book; the case of Paul’s appeal fits in with what we know of conditions in the late fifties of the first Christian century, and Luke’s account of it is worthy to be treated as a substantial contribution to the available evidence.
It was with some relief that Festus heard Paul’s appeal to Caesar: he himself would now be quit of the responsibility of adjudicating in a case where he knew himself to be out of his depth. One responsibility remained, however: he had to send to Rome along with the accused man an explanatory statement (litterae dimissoriae) outlining the nature of the case and its history up to date. In drafting this statement he was glad to have the timely aid of one who was reputed to be an expert in Jewish religious affairs.
Not long after Paul’s appeal, the younger Agrippa and his sister Bernice came to Caesarea to pay their respects to the new procurator. After the death of his father, Herod Agrippa I, in A.D. 44 the younger Agrippa, then seventeen years old, was judged by Claudius and his advisers too immature to be appointed king of the Jews in his place, but he was given a less unmanageable district farther north to rule with the title of king, and at the present time his kingdom comprised the former tetrarchies of Philip and Lysanias, east and north of the Lake of Galilee, together with the cities of Tiberias and Tarichaeae west of the Lake, and Julias in Peraea, with their surrounding villages. His capital was Caesarea Philippi (now Banyas), which he renamed Neronias as a compliment to the Emperor Nero. In addition to his royal dignity, he enjoyed from A.D. 48 to 66 the privilege of appointing (and deposing) the high priests of Israel.37
After the normal exchange of courtesies, Festus acquainted Agrippa with his problem. The charges against Paul, he said, seemed to revolve around “one Jesus, who was dead, but whom Paul asserted to be alive” (Acts 25:19). Agrippa’s interest was immediately aroused and he expressed a desire to meet Paul. Festus was only too glad to arrange an interview, and next day Paul was brought before Festus, Agrippa, Bernice and other notabilities.
The speech which Paul made, according to Luke, in response to Agrippa’s invitation to him to state his case, is as carefully adapted to this setting as his speech to the turbulent crowd in the temple court is to that setting. Luke, indeed, takes this speech as the opportunity to present Paul’s apologia pro vita sua. He is no doubt true to life when he portrays Paul as unable to maintain complete objectivity in his statement. As Paul warms to his theme that the gospel to which he is dedicated consists of “nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would come to pass” (Acts 26:22), he invites Agrippa to endorse the logic of his argument; Agrippa laughs off the invitation with the remark that Paul will not get him to play the part of a Christian as easily as that. But Agrippa agreed with Festus that Paul could not reasonably be convicted on any of the serious charges brought against him. Indeed, said the king, Paul might have been discharged on the spot had he not appealed to Caesar, but for Festus to prejudge the issue now by releasing him would have been impolitic, if not ultra vires. But Agrippa presumably gave Festus the help he required in drafting the litterae dimissoriae.
Paul did not appeal to Caesar while Felix was in office, presumably because Felix had virtually decided on his innocence and was simply postponing his formal acquittal and release. One day, Felix’s procrastination would come to an end and Paul would be discharged and be able to carry out his long-cherished plan of travelling to Rome and the west. So Paul might have hoped. But with the recall of Felix and his supersession by Festus a new and dangerous situation was developing for Paul; hence his momentous decision.
From what we know of Paul, we may be sure that the uppermost consideration in his appeal to Caesar was not his own safety, but the interests of the gospel. Seven or eight years previously he had experienced the benevolent neutrality of Roman law in the decision of Gallio, proconsul of Achaia, that there was nothing illegal in his preaching.38 He might reasonably expect a similarly favourable verdict from the supreme court in Rome. Not only so: even a man of smaller intelligence than Paul must have realized that the consideration which moved Gallio would not be valid much longer. Gallio had ruled in effect that what Paul preached was a variety of Judaism, and therefore not forbidden by Roman law. But, thanks in large measure to Paul’s own activity, it would soon be impossible to regard Christianity as a variety of Judaism, since it was now manifestly more Gentile than Jewish. A favourable hearing from the emperor in Rome might win recognition for Christianity, if not as the true fulfilment of Israel’s ancestral religion (which Paul believed it to be), at least as a permitted association (collegium licitum) in its own right.39 Besides, if Caesar in person heard Paul’s defence, what might the outcome not be?40 The younger Agrippa had politely declined to admit the logic of Paul’s argument, but Gentiles had regularly shown themselves more amenable to the gospel than Jews, and a Roman emperor might be more easily won than a Jewish client-king. It would be precarious to set limits to Paul’s high hopes, however impracticable they may appear to us in retrospect.
But would Caesar hear the case in person? This would not follow from the fact that it was to Caesar that Paul appealed. According to Tacitus, Nero announced at the beginning of his principate that he would not judge cases in propria persona, as his predecessor Claudius had done; and indeed, during his first eight years he generally delegated them to others.41 A. N. Sherwin-White is thus right in saying: “If Paul came to trial some time after the period of two years mentioned in Acts 28:30, it is probable that his case was heard by someone other than the Princeps.”42 This “someone other” might be the praefectus praetorio, “representing the Emperor in his capacity as the fountain of justice, together with the assessors and high officers of the court”.43 But this is a matter on which we have no information.