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NT Doctrine -- Acts 23 - Ed Hurst - 05-20-2023
There is nothing new for us in Paul's speech in Chapter 22 except the warning from God he received in the Temple to leave Jerusalem.
As Paul recounted his path from chief prosecutor of Christians to their chief advocate, the Hebrews listened intently right up to the moment when he mentioned taking the message to the Gentiles. While the nation had been told at the foot of Mount Sinai that they would be a nation of priests to the Gentile world, they had managed over the centuries not only to neglect that mission, but had perverted it into a vile hatred of Gentiles. By the time of Christ, it had already become Talmud Law that no Jew could ever do anything good for a Gentile by choice. But they were hardly honest about it, hiding this as a secret teaching, as they do even today. While the Romans might sense that spite, they seemed to have had no idea it was a doctrine of Jewish Law.
Once the commander got him inside the fortress, Paul just barely dodged being tortured by claiming his Roman citizenship. Now the battalion commander had a formal duty to protect Paul from the Jews. But he needed to know what had gotten such a hysterical reaction from the crowd, and so proposed to have Paul face the Sanhedrin in a Roman setting. This was apparently going to take place in the Sanhedrin's public courtroom. Paul himself had been trained as a lawyer and magistrate, so he surely had a real advantage.
Paul's customary declaration of a clear conscience offended the arrogant High Priest, so he signaled for Paul to be struck in the mouth. Paul's protest was legally justified, referring to the High Priest as no protection against injustice at all (a badly stacked wall of rubble with a thick coat of whitewash). When the lackeys asked how Paul dared to castigate the High Priest, he answered with sarcasm. Paul had worked directly with the Sanhedrin before, so he knew everyone by face and name, and all their dirty secrets. Still, his claim to not recognize the High Priest would protect him from being prosecuted for cursing the anointed ruler.
Paul knew their game too well. He knew the deck was stacked against him and that there was no point in letting things continue. Thus, he struck at their weakest point: the bitter spite between the Pharisees and Sadducees on the council. Claiming that he was a Pharisee, and that this whole prosecution was a baldly partisan attack, he was actually speaking the truth. His faith and witness for Christ was a matter of doctrine that the Pharisees already supported, in theory. But it wasn't exactly pertinent to the case.
Still, that complaint immediately divided the Sanhedrin and anything they planned to accomplish dissolved into a very raucous argument. The bitterness of the feud got physical enough that the Roman commander ordered troops to pull Paul out of the courtroom by force. That night in safe custody of the Romans, the Lord appeared to him and encouraged him. Having now testified of Christ to the high and mighty in Jerusalem, he would also do the same in Rome.
Paul's abuse of the Sanhedrin formal process was wholly justified. Forty Jewish men put themselves under a vow to neither eat nor drink until Paul was dead. They reported this conspiracy to the chief priests (who were Sadducees), and they agreed to play along. The idea was to have Paul brought down to the Sanhedrin court again, but between the fortress and the court, these forty men would overpower the small squad of Roman soldiers and murder Paul. They were all willing to die in the process, and would become fugitives if they survived. They were that determined to silence Paul, and the chief priests were in on it.
If Paul was the kind of man to have previously been a magistrate of the Sanhedrin Court, it's no surprise his sister was married and living in the city somewhere. His whole family was no doubt on the fringes of the Jewish ruling class, so her son -- Paul's nephew -- overheard this conspiracy. He came to the fort and reported it to Paul, who then had the lad share the intel with the Roman battalion commander. Given the Jewish restiveness of late, he took this whole thing quite seriously. The commander also kept whole thing secret to avoid any spies in the fortress from catching wind of this.
He then ordered two centurions to mobilize their entire units for a dangerous escort mission to the current governor, Felix, at Caesarea down on the coast, and to order up reinforcements. Paul was to ride among the seventy Roman cavalry, while two hundred heavy and two hundred light infantry marched in formation with these.
Luke cites the letter the battalion commander wrote, and we learn his name was Claudius Lysias. We should not be surprised this man painted his behavior as better than it actually was, but the rest was a spare factual report of the problem. The commander needed to justify bothering the Governor with a Jewish Roman citizen whom the Sanhedrin wanted dead.
As ordered, this huge military cohort moved out at about 9PM that night. They went about halfway to Caesarea to a town called Antipatris. Those mounted would have traveled rather slowly on the twisted hilly route down to that point, and the mass of infantry was to protect them. They stopped overnight. Antipatris stood at the transition from the Judean Hills to the coastal flatlands. As they moved out the next morning, the cavalry could now move more quickly and the infantry were no longer needed. The forty conspirators never had a chance.
Felix never got along with the Jews. Staying down in Caesarea was simply a good idea to avoid the need for a heavy bodyguard in the confines of Jerusalem. The letter from Lysias painting the Sanhedrin as out of control was accurate and not news to Felix. It turns out that this letter was actually an excellent opportunity to remind the Jews just who was in charge. Felix had full jurisdiction over Cilicia, too, and could have simply decided Paul's case immediately, but chose to drag the Sanhedrin down to see him on his home ground.
He ordered Paul to safe custody in the adjoining Praetorium Herod had built for himself. This was a sumptuous palace that the Romans had commandeered, so Paul had a nice vacation on his way to Rome.
RE: NT Doctrine -- Acts 23 - jaybreak - 05-21-2023
"They were all willing to die in the process, and would become fugitives if they survived. They were that determined to silence Paul, and the chief priests were in on it."
A plan to directly attack the Roman military? These dudes REALLY did not like Paul. Love it.