Tuesday
Tuesday
Paul the Prisoner
Seizing Paul, they dragged him from the temple, and immediately the gates were shut.
Acts 21:30
So far Luke has portrayed his hero on the offensive, taking bold initiatives to evangelize most of Asia Minor and Greece. But now he found himself on the defensive. Following Paul’s three epic missionary journeys, Luke describes his five trials—before a Jewish crowd, the Sanhedrin, Felix, Festus, and King Agrippa II. This narrative takes up nearly two hundred verses in our English Bibles. Why such detail? One of his major themes has been the relations between Jews and Gentiles. And now in Acts 21 to 23 he depicts the reaction to the gospel of these two communities. 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.
Luke shows no sign of anti-Semitism; he is simply recording the facts. He documents the Jews’ determination to get rid of Paul. Luke’s statement that when the mob dragged Paul out of the temple, “immediately the gates were shut” (21:30) was more than a fact. The slammed gates symbolized the final Jewish rejection of the gospel. Paul’s policy of turning to the Gentiles had been justified.
Luke’s second and corresponding theme is Roman justice. He presents the Roman authorities as friends of the gospel, not enemies. Luke has already shown how the magistrates in Philippi actually apologized to Paul and Silas for maltreating them, how Gallio in Corinth refused even to listen to Jewish accusations against Paul, and how the town clerk in Ephesus declared the Christian leaders innocent and dismissed the angry crowd. And now in Jerusalem Claudius Lysias, the military tribune, twice rescued Paul from being lynched, exempted him from a brutal interrogation by torture on discovering that he was a Roman citizen, and protected him from a Jewish murder plot.
This protection by Roman justice was even more clear in Paul’s trials. Although accused by the Jews, Paul was tried and exonerated by the Romans. The same had been true in the parallel trials of Jesus. 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. The legality of the Christian faith had been established.
For further reading: Acts 22:22–29