16. Paul’s arrest and self-defence
So far Luke has portrayed his hero on the offensive, taking bold initiatives under the leading of the Holy Spirit to evangelize most of Asia Minor and Greece. But when Paul arrived in Jerusalem, his whole career abruptly changed. He was assaulted, arrested, bound and brought to trial. He found himself on the defensive. Following his three epic missionary journeys Luke describes the five trials he had to endure. The first was before a Jewish crowd at the north-west corner of the temple area (22:1ff.), the second before the supreme Jewish Council in Jerusalem (23:1ff.), the third and fourth in Caesarea before Felix and Festus, who in turn served as procurator of Judea (24:1ff.; 25:1ff.), and the fifth, also in Caesarea, before King Herod Agrippa II (26:1ff.).
These five trials, including in each case Paul’s defence speech, together with the circumstances of his arrest (21:18ff.), take up six chapters in our Bibles or nearly 200 verses. Why did Luke consider it necessary to go into such detail? Of course the material was readily available to him, since he was there throughout. He arrived in Jerusalem with Paul (21:15), and the next ‘we-section’ (27:1ff.) shows that he sailed with Paul to Rome. During the two years of Paul’s custody in Caesarea (24:27), Luke was a free man, and it is natural to assume that he remained in Palestine, gathering information for his two-volume work and personally interviewing some of its chief characters.
But Luke had a better reason for giving such a comparatively full account of Paul’s trials than the mere circumstance that he had first-hand material at his disposal. For, we remember, Luke was more than a historian; he was a theologian too. One of the major themes which he has been developing concerns the relations between Jews and Gentiles in the messianic community. He has shown how Paul, called and commissioned to be the apostle to the Gentiles, has by now on three solemn occasions, in Pisidian Antioch, Corinth and Ephesus, left the synagogue and exchanged Jewish for Gentile evangelism (13:46; 18:6; 19:8–9). It is not an accident that Luke’s story begins in Jerusalem and ends in Rome.
In Acts 21 – 23, therefore, to which we have now come, Luke describes the reaction to the gospel of two communities: of the Jews who were increasingly hostile to it, and of the Romans who were consistently friendly to it. The two themes of Jewish opposition and Roman justice are interwoven in Luke’s narrative, with the Christian apostle caught between them, the victim of the one and the beneficiary of the other.
a. Jewish opposition
Jewish opposition had been evident from the beginning. Luke shows no sign of anti-Semitism; he is simply recording facts. So he documents how the Sanhedrin imprisoned first Peter and John, then all the apostles, and prohibited them with threats from preaching or teaching in the name of Jesus (4:1 – 5:42), although he also draws attention to the caution, wisdom and justice of Gamaliel (5:34ff.). Then came Stephen’s martyrdom (7:54ff.), and the Jewish persecution of the church in Jerusalem (8:1ff.) and of the one-time persecutor Saul of Tarsus (9:23ff.), which kept erupting during his subsequent missionary journeys. In Jerusalem, however, what had been spasmodic outbursts became an implacable determination to get rid of him once for all, beginning with an attempt to lynch him (21:27ff.), continuing with a hysterical demand for his death (22:22–23), and concluding with the secret plot under oath of more than forty men to murder him (23:12ff.). Luke’s statement that, when the mob dragged Paul out of the temple, ‘immediately the gates were shut’ (21:30) was surely more than a statement of fact. The slammed gates seemed to symbolize the final Jewish rejection of the gospel. Paul’s policy of turning to the Gentiles had been justified.
Luke seems also to be drawing a deliberate parallel between the sufferings (‘passion’) of Christ and the sufferings of his apostle Paul. We saw in the last chapter the similarity between their respective journeys up to Jerusalem. Now Luke takes it further, although of course Paul’s sufferings were not redemptive like Christ’s. Nevertheless, both Jesus and Paul (a) were rejected by their own people, arrested without cause and imprisoned; (b) were unjustly accused and deliberately misrepresented by false witnesses; (c) were slapped in the face in court (23:2); (d) were the hapless victims of secret Jewish plots (23:12ff.); (e) heard the terrifying noise of a frenzied mob screaming ‘Get rid of him!’ (21:36; cf. 22:22); and (f) were subjected to a series of five trials – Jesus by Annas, the Sanhedrin, King Herod Antipas and twice by Pilate; Paul by the crowd, the Sanhedrin, King Herod Agrippa II and by the two procurators, Felix and Festus.
b. Roman justice
Luke’s second and corresponding theme is Roman justice. He consistently presents the Roman authorities as friends of the gospel, not foes. We have already noticed this. It is not just that the first Gentile convert was a Roman centurion, Cornelius, or that the first convert of Paul’s missionary journeys was the Roman proconsul of Cyprus, Sergius Paulus (13:12). It is rather that, whenever they had the opportunity, the Roman authorities defended the Christian missionaries. For example, in Philippi the magistrates actually apologized to Paul and Silas for having beaten and imprisoned them, Roman citizens, and came personally to the prison to escort them out of it (16:35ff.); in Corinth Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, refused even to listen to Jewish accusations against Paul and dismissed the case (18:12ff.); and in Ephesus the city clerk declared the Christian leaders innocent, rebuked the crowd for public disorder and sent them home (19:35ff.). Now, in Jerusalem and Caesarea, Claudius Lysias, the military tribune, took Paul under his protection. He twice rescued him from being lynched by bringing him into custody (21:33ff.; 22:24); he quickly exempted him from a brutal examination by torture, on discovering that he was a Roman citizen (22:25ff.); and he protected him from the murder plot by transferring him to the procurator’s jurisdiction in Caesarea (23:23ff.).
This protection by Roman justice is even clearer in Paul’s trials. Although he was accused by the Jews, he was tried and cleared by the Romans. The same had been true of Jesus. Luke finds a third parallel here. What he takes the trouble to demonstrate is that, although the Jews brought accusations against Jesus and his apostle Paul, the Romans could find no fault in either. In the case of Jesus, Luke records a threefold statement of Pilate that in his opinion Jesus was innocent. To the chief priests and the crowd he said, ‘I find no basis for a charge against this man.’ To the same people, after Jesus had been tried by Herod, Pilate said, ‘I have examined him in your presence and have found no basis for your charges against him. Neither has Herod.’ And when the crowd kept shouting, ‘Crucify him!’, Pilate spoke to them for the third time: ‘Why? What crime has this man committed? I have found in him no grounds for the death penalty.’
The parallel in the case of Paul is impressive. Luke is not saying that Roman justice was perfect (for he mentions the readiness of Felix to be bribed, 24:26), but asserting that Paul had not offended it. It is not only that he declared his own innocence (‘I have done nothing wrong against the Jewish law or against the temple or against Caesar’, 25:8), but that his judges agreed with him. Claudius Lysias, in his letter to Felix, affirmed that ‘there was no charge against him that deserved death or imprisonment’ (23:29). The procurator Festus told King Agrippa: ‘I found he had done nothing deserving of death’ (25:25). And Agrippa, when the series of trials was over, summed up in these words: ‘This man is not doing anything that deserves death or imprisonment . . . This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar’ (26:31–32).
Thus three times in the case of Jesus, and three times in the case of Paul, the accused was declared not guilty in a court of law. Sir William Ramsay made much of this in his St Paul the Traveller and the Roman Citizen (1895): ‘It is beyond doubt that, on our hypothesis, the amount of space assigned to Paul’s imprisonment and successive examinations marks this as the most important part of the book in the author’s estimation.’ Ramsay went on to argue that, when eventually Paul stood before Caesar, he was acquitted, as the Pastoral Epistles indicate, and that his trial, with its ‘formal decision by the supreme court of the Empire’, ‘was really a charter of religious liberty, and therein lies its immense importance’. He concluded that Luke contemplated a third volume documenting the trial in Rome, the acquittal, the apostle’s resumed missionary labours, and his subsequent arrest, imprisonment and death under Nero. For Ramsay believed that Luke was writing during the reign of Domitian, ‘when Christians had come to be treated as outlaws or brigands, and the mere confession of the name was recognized as an offence’. In such a situation, Acts was ‘not an apology for Christianity; it was an appeal to the truth of history against the immoral and ruinous policy of the reigning Emperor’.
Whether or not we can accept all the details of Ramsay’s reconstruction (including the date of Acts and Luke’s intention to write a sequel), we must surely agree over Luke’s objective. He deliberately sets out to demonstrate the innocence in the eyes of Roman law of both Jesus (Luke’s Gospel) and Paul (Acts), and to draw attention to the precedent which the outcome of their trials had established for the legality of the Christian faith. Luke’s purpose has shown the church of all subsequent times and places how to behave under persecution. It must be able to show that accusations of crimes against the state and against humanity (which were often alleged in the early centuries) are groundless; that it is innocent of offences against the law; and that its members are conscientious citizens, that is, submissive to the state in so far as their conscience permits them. Then the freedom to profess, practise and spread the gospel will, to the extent that it lies with the church, be preserved, and the only offence which Christians give will be the stumbling block of the cross.
1. Paul meets James and accepts his proposal (21:18–26)
We have already noted that, when Paul and his friends arrived in Jerusalem, they received a genuinely warm welcome (17). Now, however, Luke explains the tension underlying this welcome (18ff.). The next day, without any delay, Paul and the rest of us, who had accompanied him from Corinth, including Luke, went to see James. James was still the recognized leader of the church in Jerusalem, and indeed of the worldwide Jewish Christian community, especially now that the apostles Peter and John seem to have left the city. Not that James was alone when he received Paul and his friends, for all the elders were present (18). Since the Jewish Christians now numbered many thousands (20), a large number of elders must have been needed to pastor them. Paul greeted them (19a).
In showing Paul and James face to face, Luke presents his readers with a dramatic situation, fraught with both risk and possibility. For James and Paul were the representative leaders of two Christianities, Jewish and Gentile. This was not, of course, their first meeting. It was at least their fourth. For Paul had called on James during his first visit to Jerusalem years previously, and again when he went there fourteen years after that. Then they had both been prominent figures at the Jerusalem Council (15:12ff.). During the intervening years, however, the movements they led had grown considerably under God’s good hand. Indeed, as they greeted one another now, each was flanked by sample fruits of their respective missions, Paul by his companions from the Gentile churches, and James by the elders of the Jerusalem church. Some people were doubtless asserting that the doctrinal positions of James and Paul were incompatible, as they had done before the Jerusalem Council (15:1–2), Paul teaching salvation by grace, and James salvation by works. Hence later Luther’s uneasiness, which led him to dub the letter of James an ‘epistle of straw’. It is not that he wanted to exclude it from the canon, but that he felt he could not include it among the ‘chief’ books which unambiguously teach justification by faith alone. So when Paul and James faced each other in Jerusalem, there could have been a painful confrontation.
But both apostles were in a conciliatory frame of mind. Take James first. When Paul reported in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry (19; i.e. not what Paul had done with God’s help), James and his elders not only heard this, listening attentively to Paul’s account, but they praised God together (20a). No murmur of disapproval was heard. As in the case of the conversion of Cornelius (11:18), the evangelization of Greeks in Antioch (11:22–23) and the first missionary journey (14:27; 15:12), the evidence of God’s grace towards Gentiles was indisputable, and the only appropriate response was worship. The joyful praise of James and the elders was not even grudging; it was spontaneous and genuine.
But Paul was also anxious to be conciliatory towards the Jewish Christian community, and showed it in two ways. The first, which for some reason Luke mentions only later in 24:17, was the presentation to the Jewish church of the offerings given by the Gentile churches of the west. It seems to me likely that Paul made this at the beginning of his visit to James. Perhaps it partly accounts for the warm reception of verse 17. Certainly the collection was of great importance to Paul. Not only had he been preoccupied with it for several years, but he had even postponed his intended visit to Rome and Spain in order first to deliver it personally in Jerusalem (19:21). The offering was important in itself, and an expression of loving Christian responsibility to the poor. ‘The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil’; but the use of money can be a tangible token of love. The chief significance of the offering, however, lay in its symbolism. It demonstrated the solidarity of Gentile believers with their Jewish sisters and brothers in the body of Christ. That is why representatives of the Gentile churches had travelled all the way from Corinth in order to share in presenting their gifts, and were even now present with Paul. Further, the offering was a humble acknowledgment of mutual indebtedness. True, the Gentile churches ‘were pleased’ to give, out of love, but also (Paul wrote) ‘they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, they owe it to the Jews to share with them their material blessings.’ It was surely because of the symbolic nature of the offering that Paul was so concerned about it. He was anxious that it should not be misunderstood, as an unwelcome paternalism perhaps, or as an attempt to buy favour, and that its acceptance should not be misinterpreted as a kind of surrender by Jewish Christians to Paul’s pro-Gentile stance. This is why he urged the Roman Christians to pray with him that ‘the contribution I take to Jerusalem may be favourably received by the Lord’s people there’. He wanted to express their fellowship in Christ by giving the gift; would the Jewish Christians reciprocate by receiving it?
Luke concentrates, however, on the second example of Paul’s conciliatory spirit, namely the positive way in which he responded to the proposal James put to him. This arose because of the existence of both Jewish believers (20) and Gentile believers (25). The question was how they could be helped to live together in amity, especially in view of Jewish Christian scruples about law-observance. James and the elders said to Paul: You see, brother [a touching, because unselfconscious, acknowledgment of their unity in God’s family], how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law (20), that is, are ‘staunch upholders’ of it (neb, jbp, jb). They have been informed [in fact, misinformed] that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles [in the diaspora] to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs (21). What exactly was James’s concern, then? First, it was not about the way of salvation (James and Paul were agreed that this was through Christ, not through the law), but about the way of discipleship. Second, it was not about what Paul taught Gentile converts (he did teach them that circumcision was unnecessary, and James and the Jerusalem Council had said the same thing), but about what he was teaching ‘the Jews who live among the Gentiles’ (21). Third, it was not about the moral law (Paul and James were agreed that God’s people must live a holy life according to God’s commandments), but about Jewish ‘customs’ (21). In a word, should Jewish believers continue to observe Jewish cultural practices? The rumour was that Paul was teaching them not to.
So what shall we do? James asked Paul. The law-zealous Jewish Christians will certainly hear that you have come, so do what we tell you. There are four men with us who have made a vow. Take these men, join in their purification rites and pay their expenses, so that they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in these reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law (22–24), or ‘are a practising Jew’ (neb). The reference to the four Jewish Christians shaving their heads indicates that they had taken a Nazirite vow. James’s proposal in relation to them was double. First, Paul should ‘join in their purification rites’. Commentators are not agreed about what James had in mind. Perhaps he wanted Paul to identify himself with the four either at the conclusion of the thirty-day period of their vow or in some special ritual necessary because they had contracted defilement during the same period. Or it may mean that Paul had a seven-day purification ceremony of his own to undergo because during his long absence from Jerusalem the Jews regarded him as having become ceremonially unclean. Second, James proposed that Paul should ‘pay their expenses’, which could have been quite substantial.
Having referred to the scruples of the Jewish Christians (20–24), James turned to the corresponding responsibility of the Gentile Christians. As for the Gentile believers, he said, the controversy had been settled some years ago at the Council of Jerusalem, as Paul knew well, for we have written to them our decision that they should abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals and from sexual immorality (25; cf. 15:20, 29) – four cultural practices, as I argued in chapter 11.
Paul agreed with James’s proposal, and began to comply with it as soon as possible. The next day Paul took the men and purified himself along with them. Then he went to the temple to give notice of the date when the days of purification would end and the offering would be made for each of them (26).
We can only thank God for the generosity of spirit displayed by both James and Paul. They were already agreed doctrinally (that salvation was by grace in Christ through faith) and ethically (that Christians must obey the moral law). The issue between them concerned culture, ceremony and tradition. The solution to which they came was not a compromise, in the sense of sacrificing a doctrinal or moral principle, but a concession in the area of practice. We have already seen Paul’s conciliatory spirit in accepting the Jerusalem decrees and circumcising Timothy. Now, in the same tolerant spirit, he was prepared to undergo some purification rituals in order to pacify Jewish scruples. James seems to have gone too far in expecting Paul to live ‘in obedience to the law’ (24) in all matters and at all times, if that is what he meant. But Paul was certainly ready to do so on special occasions, for the sake of evangelism, for example, or – as here – for the sake of Jewish–Gentile solidarity. According to his conviction Jewish cultural practices belonged to the ‘matters indifferent’, from which he had been liberated, but which he might or might not himself practise according to the circumstances. As F. F. Bruce neatly put it, ‘a truly emancipated spirit such as Paul’s is not in bondage to its own emancipation’. But James demonstrated a similarly sweet and generous mind, both by praising God for the Gentile mission and by accepting the offering from the Gentile churches. It was not a trade-off, almost a bargain, as some commentators have represented it (‘We will identify with you by accepting the Gentile offering, if you will identify with us by accepting Jewish observances’). It was rather a sensitive, mutual Christian forbearance. The unbending prejudice and fanatical violence of the unbelieving Jews, which Luke describes next, stands out in ugly contrast.
2. Paul is assaulted and arrested (21:27–36)
a. Paul is assaulted by the Jews (21:27–32)
It was in connection with the seven-day purification ritual, and near its end, that Paul was in the temple. He was recognized by some Jews from proconsular Asia, probably from Ephesus itself. They seem also to have recognized Trophimus the Ephesian (29). They provoked the worshipping crowd to frenzy by two accusations. The first of these was a misunderstanding, for they represented Paul as teaching everybody everywhere against our people and our law and this place (28a). ‘It is ironical’, Howard Marshall rightly comments, ‘that this should have been the charge against Paul at a time when he himself was undergoing purification so that he would not defile the temple!’ The charge was similar to that laid against Stephen, who was accused by false witnesses of ‘speaking against this holy place and against the law’ (6:13). But the Jews misunderstood both Stephen and Paul, just as they had misunderstood Jesus. Jesus spoke of himself as the fulfilment of the temple, the people and the law, and Stephen and Paul followed suit. This was not to belittle them, however, but to reveal their true glory.
The second accusation, that Paul had brought Greeks into the temple area and so defiled it (28b), was simply untrue. It was not a deliberate lie, Luke charitably adds, but rather an assumption on their part (29). They had seen Trophimus (whom they knew to be a Gentile) with Paul in the city, and had jumped to the conclusion that Paul had also brought him into the temple’s inner court, which was forbidden to Gentiles. Gentiles were permitted to enter only the outer court, the Court of the Gentiles. Beyond this, and preventing access into the Court of Israel, there was ‘a stone wall for a partition’, 4.5 ft high, ‘with an inscription which forbade any foreigner to go in under pain of death’. This is Josephus’s description, and he added that there were many such inscriptions, written in Greek and in Latin, at equal distance from each other. F. F. Bruce adds:
Two of these notices (both in Greek) have been found – one in 1871 and one in 1935 – the text of which runs: ‘No foreigner may enter within the barricade which surrounds the temple and enclosure. Anyone who is caught doing so will have himself to blame for his ensuing death.’
Titus (the Roman general and later emperor) reminded the Jews that the Romans had even given them ‘leave to kill such as go beyond it [the barricade], though he were a Roman’. Paul was surely thinking of this barrier when he wrote of ‘the dividing wall of hostility’ between Jews and Gentiles.
The combination of these two accusations – the one a half-truth and the other an untruth – was enough to bring people running from all directions (30), who proceeded to seize Paul, drag him out of the inner court and try to kill him. Fortunately, soldiers of the Roman garrison, always on the lookout for public disorder in Jerusalem, saw what was happening and rescued him in the nick of time. Their barracks were in the fortress of Antonia, which Herod the Great had built at the north-west corner of the temple area. The garrison usually consisted of a thousand men. In charge of them was a chiliarchos, which can be translated ‘military tribune’, commander of the Roman troops (31) or ‘colonel of the regiment’ (jbp). We know that at this time he was Claudius Lysias (23:26). Hearing that the city was in an uproar, he rushed down personally with some officers and men, and the rioters at once gave up beating Paul.
b. Paul is arrested by the Romans (21:33–36)
It is worth noting that the same verb epilambanomai is used both of the mob ‘seizing’ Paul (30) and of the commander ‘arresting’ him (33), although they had opposite objectives. The crowd were bent on lynching him, the military tribune on taking him into protective custody. It is a striking example of Luke’s aim to contrast Jewish hostility with Roman justice. When the commander failed to discover who the prisoner was and what he had done, because of the hubbub, he had him taken, indeed (owing to the mob’s violence) carried, into the barracks. Meanwhile, the crowd was shouting, Get rid of him! (36), just as nearly thirty years previously another crowd had shouted about another prisoner.
3. Paul defends himself before the crowd (21:37 – 22:22)
Claudius Lysias, as an honest, open-minded Roman soldier, compares favourably with the prejudiced Jewish crowd. They had assumed, without taking the trouble to check it, that Paul had brought Trophimus into the inner court of the temple; Claudius Lysias had assumed that Paul was an Egyptian terrorist, but immediately changed his mind when he learned the facts. The revolutionary to whom Lysias was referring was described by Josephus as ‘an Egyptian false prophet’ who, about three years previously, had got together 30,000 men (Josephus was prone to exaggeration!), led them to the Mount of Olives, and promised them that, when the walls of Jerusalem fell flat at his command, they would be able to break into the city and overpower the Romans. But the procurator Felix and his troops intervened, and the sikarioi (‘dagger men’, i.e. fanatical nationalist assassins) were killed, captured or scattered. But the Egyptian disappeared, and the commander at first thought that he had now come to light again. But Paul enlightened him about his identity. He spoke proudly of his citizenship of Tarsus, which was ‘the first city of Cilicia, not merely in material wealth but in intellectual distinction, as one of the great university cities of the Roman world’. He then asked leave to address the crowd, which was granted.
As Paul boldly made his speech or defence (apologia, 22:1) to the hostile crowd from the stone steps which led up from the temple to the fortress of Antonia, he did so with great sensitivity and appropriateness. His sensitivity is seen both in his polite address to his audience as Brothers and fathers and in his choice of the Aramaic language, which in itself was enough to quieten them. But was what he said appropriate to the occasion? This is, of course, the second time that Luke has given his readers an account of Paul’s conversion. Previously he gave it in his own words, but this time (and the third time before King Agrippa) he gives it in Paul’s words. In each case the outline is the same, but the particular emphasis of each testimony is well fitted to its context. To the crowd in Jerusalem, whose angry complaint was that he taught everybody everywhere against the people, the law and the temple (21:28), Paul stressed his personal loyalty to his Jewish origins and faith.
First, he spoke of his Jewish birth and upbringing, and of his training in the law of our ancestors (3) under Gamaliel (cf. 5:34), the most eminent teacher of that time and the leader of the school of Hillel, whose disciple he had been. So his Jewishness was undeniable. He was ‘a Hebrew of the Hebrews’. Second, he drew attention to his zeal for God, which was as great as theirs, since he had persecuted the followers of the Way, both men and women, even to prison and to death. The Sanhedrin could testify to this, since it was they who had issued him with the extradition order which he took with him to Damascus.
Third, Paul narrated the circumstances of his conversion, which was due entirely to a divine intervention, and not at all to any initiative of his own. A light from heaven had blinded him, and the person who spoke to him had identified himself as Jesus of Nazareth. Fourth, Paul referred to the ministry of Ananias, whom he deliberately characterized as a devout observer of the law and highly respected by all the Jews living there in Damascus (12). It was he who restored Paul’s sight, who told him that the God of our ancestors had chosen him to know his will, see the Righteous One, ‘hear his very voice’ (14, neb) and be his witness, and who baptized him. Then fifth, Paul came to his vision, which took place in the very temple he was supposed later to have defiled, and in which the Lord (18: Jesus is not mentioned by name) told him to leave Jerusalem immediately, in spite of his reluctance and objections. Go, the Lord had said; I will send you far away to the Gentiles. That is, exapostelō se, almost ‘I will make you an apostle’, indeed the apostle to the Gentiles (21; 26:17).
It was at this point that Paul was interrupted by the crowd, who found their voices again and loudly demanded his death (22). It is important to understand why. In their eyes proselytism (making Gentiles into Jews) was fine; but evangelism (making Gentiles into Christians without first making them Jews) was an abomination. It was tantamount to saying that Jews and Gentiles were equal, for they both needed to come to God through Christ, and that on identical terms.
Looking back over Paul’s defence, we may perhaps say that he made two major points. The first was that he himself was a loyal Jew, not only by birth and education but still. True, he was now a witness where before he had been a persecutor. But the God of his ancestors was his God still. He had not broken away from his ancestral faith, still less apostatized; he stood in direct continuity with it. Jesus of Nazareth was ‘the Righteous One’ in whom prophecy had been fulfilled. And Paul’s second point was that those features of his faith which had changed, especially his acknowledgment of Jesus and his Gentile mission, were not his own eccentric ideas. They had been directly revealed to him from heaven, the one truth in Damascus and the other in Jerusalem. Indeed, nothing but such a heavenly intervention could have so completely transformed him.
4. Paul is protected by Roman law (22:23–29)
Roman law and justice come to Paul’s aid twice more in this brief section. Claudius Lysias rescues him first from another lynching, and, second, having discovered his Roman citizenship, from flogging.
a. The rescue from lynching (22:23–24)
The crowd was not content with shouting and screaming (22); they started waving their cloaks about and flinging dust into the air (23). H. J. Cadbury suggested that these gestures may have expressed not so much excitement, anger and hostility as horror in reaction to blasphemy. In any case, the commander blocked any further attempt by the crowd to get their hands on Paul by giving orders (for the second time) for him to be taken into the barracks. He then ‘gave instructions to examine him by flogging’ (24, neb). This ghastly ordeal was the standard way of extracting information from prisoners.
The scourge (Latin flagellum) was a fearful instrument of torture, consisting of leather thongs, weighted with rough pieces of metal or bone, and attached to a stout wooden handle. If a man did not actually die under the scourge (which frequently happened), he would certainly be crippled for life.
b. The rescue from flogging (22:25–29)
Paul was actually being prepared for the flogging when he disclosed his Roman citizenship. Similarly, in Philippi he had not revealed that he was a Roman citizen until after he had been beaten, imprisoned and put in the stocks (16:37). He seems for some reason not to have wanted to take advantage of being a citizen except in some dire extremity. Dr Sherwin-White acknowledges that ‘the precise legal situation of Roman citizens in provincial jurisdiction is not well documented at this period’. Nor is it clear precisely what the citizen’s privileges were, although it is agreed that he was exempt from examination by flogging, that is, torture without trial. Citizenship tended to be either by right (for those of high status or office) or by reward (for those who had served the empire well). It was passed on from father to son (which was the case with Paul); it could also be bought, not with a fee but with a bribe to some corrupt official ‘in the imperial secretariat or the provincial administration’, which was the case with Claudius Lysias. Indeed, such corruption was rife during the reign of the Emperor Claudius, which may explain why the commander had added the nomen Claudius, in honour of the emperor, to his cognomen Lysias.
Although the commander was alarmed when he realised that he had put Paul, a Roman citizen, in chains (29), he does not seem to have released him from them. At least he was still in chains the following day and subsequently. What is the explanation of this? ‘Possibly a distinction is to be made between the heavy chains, a torture in themselves (of which Paul may have been relieved) and the lighter chains to prevent the prisoner from escaping.’
5. Paul stands before the Sanhedrin (22:30 – 23:11)
The commander was determined to find out exactly why Paul was being accused by the Jews (22:30). He had tried questioning the crowd but had got different answers from them (21:33–34). He was about to use torture, but Paul’s Roman citizenship blocked that avenue (22:24ff.). So now he opted for a third method – trial by the Sanhedrin (22:30). The high priest Ananias was a thoroughly unsavoury character. He was described by Josephus as ‘a great hoarder up of money’; he even ‘took away the tithes that belonged to the priests by violence’.
Although Luke’s account of this trial is brief, it raises at least three rather perplexing problems, the first two concerning Paul and Ananias, and the third concerning Paul, the Pharisees and the Sadducees.
a. Paul and the high priest Ananias (23:1–5)
First, why was the high priest so enraged by Paul’s opening remark that he ordered him to be struck on the mouth? It can hardly have been on a point of order, that Paul spoke before he had been spoken to. Nor does it seem likely that his reason and experience were affronted, inasmuch as anybody who claimed to have lived a consistently conscience-free life was (in his view) a blatant liar. Nor is it easily conceivable that the high priest was exasperated by a plea of ‘not guilty’. The most likely explanation is that Ananias understood Paul’s words as a claim that, though now a Christian, he was still a good Jew, having served God with a good conscience all his life (since, as well as before, his conversion), even to this day (1). This was certainly the claim Paul made in 2 Timothy 1:3. It seemed to Ananias the height of arrogance, even of blasphemy.
Second, why was Paul’s riposte so rude? Jerome seems to have been the first commentator to draw attention to the contrast between Jesus and Paul before their judges. Jesus answered much more coolly when he was slapped in the face. Besides, Paul had recently written of himself and his associates, ‘When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it.’ It may be that he did lose his temper, for he more or less apologized, indicating that he would have responded differently if he had known he was addressing the high priest. How is it, then, that he did not recognize the high priest? Many answers have been suggested. Indeed, according to Haenchen, Paul’s statement is ‘so unbelievable that it has driven the theologians to desperate efforts’. Some think that this was an informal meeting of the Sanhedrin and that in consequence Ananias was neither robed nor presiding, so that he could easily have escaped recognition. Others guess that in the babel of voices in court Paul was not able to identify who it was who had ordered him to be struck. A third interpretation is that Paul was speaking in sarcasm, as if to say, ‘I did not realize that a man such as you could be the high priest.’ But to me the most likely explanation lies in the poor eyesight which Paul is known to have had. In this case you whitewashed wall (3) may have been not so much a reference to hypocrisy as an impolite reference to a white-robed figure across the court whom Paul could only dimly perceive.
b. Paul, the Pharisees and the Sadducees (23:6–10)
Several questions also confront us when we read this part of the narrative. Was Paul justified in deliberately setting the Pharisees and the Sadducees against one another? And was he correct to call himself a Pharisee? There is certainly no need to attribute to Paul either unworthy motives or an untrue statement. He was genuinely concerned about doctrine, and he did believe (as we should) that the resurrection is fundamental to Christianity. The anti-supernaturalist stance of the Sadducees was incompatible with the gospel. As Jesus himself said, the reason they were wrong was that they knew neither God’s word nor God’s power. Paul was a Pharisee, however, not only in the sense of his parentage and education (6), but also in the sense that he shared with Pharisees the great truth and hope of the resurrection, on account of which he was on trial.
After the uproar which followed, the Pharisees stood up for Paul and declared that they could find nothing wrong with him. This seems to have triggered further argument, which became so violent that the commander had to rescue him for the third time and have him brought into safe custody in the fortress of Antonia.
c. Paul and the Lord Jesus (23:11)
After the confrontation between Paul and Ananias, and the heated argument between the Pharisees and the Sadducees, it is a relief to read that during the following night the Lord Jesus came and stood near Paul and spoke to him. The violence of the last two days, and especially the hostility of the Jews, must have made him wonder anxiously about the future. There seemed little prospect of his leaving Jerusalem alive, let alone of his travelling on to Rome. So in this moment of discouragement Jesus comforted him with the straightforward promise that, as he had borne witness to him in Jerusalem, so he must also bear witness to him in Rome. It would be hard to exaggerate the calm courage which this assurance must have brought to Paul during his three further trials, his two years’ imprisonment and his hazardous voyage to Rome.
6. Paul is rescued from a Jewish plot (23:12–35)
a. The plot is hatched (23:12–22)
The Asian Jews had been frustrated in their attempts to lynch Paul, and the Sanhedrin had been unable to convict him of any offence. So now a group of more than forty Jewish men hatched a plot to murder him, binding themselves by oath to eat and drink nothing until they had succeeded. They then prevailed on the chief priests to persuade the Sanhedrin to petition the commander to cooperate with them. Their scheme was to have Paul brought back to court along narrow streets where he could easily be intercepted and killed. It seemed that everybody was now involved in the conspiracy and that Paul was in extreme danger.
But even the most careful and cunning of human plans cannot succeed if God opposes them. No weapon forged against him will triumph. On this occasion God’s providential intervention involved Paul’s nephew. It is tantalizing to read these references to Paul’s sister and her son, and to have no further information about them. Were they believers? Did they have some association with Jewish leaders which made it natural for Paul’s nephew to learn of the plot without arousing anybody’s suspicions? And how is it that he got access into the barracks so easily, especially if (as it seems from verse 19) he was only a young man? Luke does not satisfy our curiosity about any of these matters. What we do know is that the news of the plot spread from Paul’s nephew to Paul, from Paul to a centurion, and from the centurion to the commander, who then learned about it from the young man’s own lips. Doubtless remembering Paul’s Roman citizenship, the commander decided on immediate and resolute action.
b. The plot is foiled (23:23–35)
The detachment of two hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen (23) certainly sounds like an extraordinary over-provision, representing about half the garrison. Were four hundred soldiers and seventy horses really necessary for the security of a single prisoner? It is this question which has made scholars wonder whether ‘spearmen’ is the correct translation of dexiolaboi, which occurs nowhere else in biblical or contemporary Greek literature. Kirsopp and Lake guessed that it means ‘led horses’, which would include both substitute mounts for the long overnight journey of nearly 40 miles, and pack horses too. Some more recent commentators have adopted this suggestion.
Their destination was Caesarea, which, being the provincial capital of Judea, was where Felix the governor had his residence. Felix ruled as Judea’s procurator for seven or eight years from ad 52. He owed his appointment to his brother Pallas, who was a favourite at court, first of the Emperor Claudius, and then of Nero. Felix was utterly ruthless in quelling Jewish uprisings. Though he was a freedman, he seems never to have grown out of a servile mentality, so that Tacitus wrote that ‘he exercised the power of a king with the mind of a slave’.
People naturally ask how Luke could have managed to get hold of the tribune’s official letter to the procurator, so as to be able to publish its text. It is not impossible that it was read out in court, or that Felix revealed its contents to Paul during one of the occasions on which he questioned him privately (23:34; 24:24). On the other hand, Luke says that Claudius Lysias wrote to Felix as follows (25) or ‘to this effect’ (rsv, neb), so that he may be claiming to give no more than the gist of its contents. In any case, as we read the letter, we cannot help smiling. The tribune was substantially accurate in describing how he had rescued Paul, given him special treatment as a Roman citizen, brought him before the Sanhedrin, learned that the charges against him were only religious (about ‘Moses and a certain Jesus’, according to the Western text of verse 29), not civil or criminal, foiled a Jewish plot against him, sent him to the governor, and ordered his accusers to come and present their case in court. At the same time, Lysias somewhat manipulated the facts in order to portray himself in the most favourable light, putting his discovery that Paul was a Roman citizen before his rescue instead of after it, and drawing a discreet veil of silence over his serious offence in binding, and preparing to torture, a Roman citizen. Nine of the principal verbs in his letter are in the first person singular. The letter was fairly honourable, but decidedly self-centred.
After setting out the text of the letter, Luke describes the military transfer of Paul from Jerusalem, via Antipatris, where the troops stopped for the night, to Caesarea, where both letter and prisoner were handed over to Felix. The governor read the letter, enquired about Paul’s province in order to be sure that he came within his jurisdiction, determined to hear the case himself when Paul’s accusers arrived, and ordered Paul to be kept under guard meanwhile in the rather magnificent palace which Herod the Great had built for himself and which was now the praetorium, the governor’s official residence. Luke does not explain what kept under guard will have meant, but we may be sure that, as a Roman citizen, and with no criminal charges to face, Paul was not ill-treated.
Luke’s great skill as a historian-theologian, not to mention the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is clearly seen in these chapters. The future of the gospel was at stake, as powerful forces ranged themselves for and against it. On the one hand, the Jewish persecutors were prejudiced and violent. On the other, the Romans were open-minded and went out of their way to maintain the standards of law, justice and order of which their best leaders were understandably proud. Four times they rescued Paul from death either by lynching or by murder, taking him into custody until the charges against him could be clarified and, if coherent, presented in court. Then three times in Luke’s narrative, as we have seen, Paul either has been or will be declared innocent.
Between these two powers, religious and civil, hostile and friendly, Jerusalem and Rome, Paul found himself trapped, unarmed and totally vulnerable. We cannot help admiring his courage, especially when he stood on the steps of Fortress Antonia, facing an angry crowd which had just severely ill-treated him, with no power but the word and the Spirit of God. Luke seems to offer him to us as a model of Christian courage so that, as Chrysostom put it at the end of his fifty-fifth and last homily on Acts, we may ‘emulate Paul, and imitate that noble, that adamantine soul’. The source of his courage was his serene confidence in the truth. He was well aware that the Romans had no case against him. He was convinced that the Jews had no case either, because his faith was the faith of his fathers, and the gospel was the fulfilment of the law. And above all he knew that his Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ was with him and would keep his promise that he would bear witness, some day, somehow, in Rome.