NOW AT LAST it was time for Paul to set off to Jerusalem with the money. This great collection project, so long in the planning, drew together two of his guiding passions, two strands of hope and ambition that had been central since at least the late 40s. First, “Remember the poor”! Second, “There is no longer Jew or Greek . . . in the Messiah, Jesus.”1 Paul had set out the rationale for this project, complex and dangerous as it must have been, in 2 Corinthians 8–9 and Romans 15. Generosity was itself one of the hallmarks of following Jesus, not least because the entire drama of the gospel involved the ultimate generosity of Jesus himself:
You know the grace of our Lord, King Jesus: he was rich, but because of you he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.2
One single sentence gives us Paul’s entire vision of Jesus, as in Philippians 2 and Colossians 1, shaped as an exhortation to act with “enthusiasm and love” and serving the vital purpose of unity across the greatest of traditional divides:
If the nations have shared in the Jews’ spiritual blessings, it is right and proper that they should minister to their earthly needs.3
In other words, the collection was designed to remind the (largely) Gentile churches of their deep and lasting obligation to the Jewish people in general and the Jerusalem church in particular. And it was designed to communicate to the Jerusalem church, and perhaps to a wider Jewish audience, the fact that the Gentile churches did not see themselves as a “new religion” and had no intention of cutting loose and creating a different kind of community. They were part of the same family and as such were doing what “family” always did—helping one another out as need arose.
Some have suggested yet another motive. According to this view, in Romans 11 Paul was hinting that one day a large number of presently unbelieving Jews would turn to the Messiah and that this event would precipitate the final day, the coming parousia of Jesus himself, the resurrection of the dead, the rescue of the old creation from its slavery to decay, the joining into one, in the Messiah, of heaven and earth themselves. “What will their acceptance mean,” he had written, “but life from the dead?”4 Paul did indeed hope for all these things. Did he link them to the collection?
Almost certainly not. He did not say in Romans 15, “I am going to Jerusalem with the collection, so please pray that they will welcome it, so that a great many presently unbelieving Jews will turn to Jesus as Messiah and that Jesus will then return.” He asked them to pray simply that he would be delivered from the unbelievers and that the Jerusalem church would welcome what he had done. In any case, he was planning, as soon as he could, to go on to Rome and then Spain. Though we may be sure that all Paul’s plans carried the footnote “If the Lord wills” and that all his assessments of God’s purposes had the word “maybe” or “perhaps” attached to them, as in Philemon 15, it seems unlikely that he would be thinking that God really wanted him simultaneously to go to Rome and then on to Spain and to give money to Jerusalem so that the parousia could happen at last. In fact, not only is it very dubious to suggest that he was proposing in Romans 11 a large-scale Jewish conversion that would precipitate the Lord’s return, but the suggested link with the collection is one that Paul never made and, granted his other plans, would certainly not have made.
Paul was not the only Jew to collect money for Jerusalem from diaspora communities. The Jewish Temple tax, designed to support the work of the Jerusalem Temple itself, was levied on Jewish communities around the world. The rate was set at two drachmas for every adult male. This was not only a practical necessity for the maintenance of a huge building and its regular round of worship. It meant that even those who could not themselves go to Jerusalem to worship were nevertheless joining in with Temple worship at one remove. There is evidence that under Rome the civic officials took some care for the safe delivery of the money, and pilgrims heading for Jerusalem regularly traveled in sizable groups.5 Without that, a well-known annual shipment of money would be an obvious target for highway robbery or indeed embezzlement.
Those were problems of which Paul was obviously well aware, but before we address that it is interesting to ask whether he saw his collection as in any sense a Jesus-shaped version of the Jewish tax. He cannot have been unaware of the parallel. Granted that the Jerusalem leaders were known as the “pillars”—however much Paul might raise an eyebrow at the thought!—he must have realized that sending money to support the Jerusalem church was, in a sense, helping to keep the “new Temple” standing. But if he made anything more of this, we do not pick it up in his letters.
More to the point is his careful organization of a group to take responsibility for the money and its safe delivery. We saw earlier the problem when one person was entrusted with delivering money; in that case, Epaphroditus brought the Philippians’ gift to Paul in Ephesus and then was prevented by illness from returning at the expected time, arousing suspicions. So Paul assured the Corinthians, early on in his planning, that he would write formal letters to accompany the people they approved to send to Jerusalem with their gift. At this time, it wasn’t clear whether he would himself go with them.6 By the time he wrote 2 Corinthians, he saw even more clearly the need for complete transparency at every stage of the project. Titus and the unnamed companion would be assisting in the work, Paul said, “both for the Lord’s own glory and to show our own good faith,” because “we are trying to avoid the possibility that anyone would make unpleasant accusations about this splendid gift which we are administering.”7 Everybody knows today, and everybody knew then, that money is sticky; people who touch it tend to come away with some of it on their hands. Not only must that not happen; it must be seen not to have happened.
Paul had originally intended to sail directly to Syria.8 That might have made transporting the money a lot easier. But he became aware of a plot against him and decided instead to go by land once more, around northern Greece. By the time they set off (probably in late summer 57), the party had grown. Northern Greece was represented by Sopater (perhaps the Sosipater of Rom. 16:21) from Beroea and by Aristarchus and Secundus from Thessalonica. The churches of Galatia were represented by Gaius from Derbe. Asia, in other words Ephesus and the surrounding country, was represented by Timothy, Tychicus (Paul’s messenger to Colossae and Laodicea a year or so earlier), and Trophimus. Aristarchus had been with Paul during his Ephesian imprisonment.9 Timothy was of course originally from Lystra in Galatia, but he had by this time worked consistently in Ephesus and was able to be regarded as a representative of Asia. We assume, from the “we” in Acts at this point, that Luke was in the party at least from Philippi; perhaps, since nobody else from that important church is mentioned in the list,10 he is taking that role. We are surprised too that, despite 1 Corinthians 16, there was no official representative from southern Greece. Perhaps they knew some of these men well enough to trust them. The point of having such a sizable group is obvious. Not only would there have been comparative safety in numbers; these seven would have been able to report back to their respective churches that the money had been delivered safely.
But how did they transport it? This is a difficult question. There was no unified banking system in his day that would have allowed Paul and his friends to deposit a large sum in Corinth or Ephesus or elsewhere and then to draw out an equivalent sum in Caesarea or Jerusalem. That might have been possible in Egypt, where a network of royal or state banks had developed branches in local areas. Similar systems were in place in parts of Italy. But even had there been an integrated international system within the larger Roman Empire, banking involved deposits, loans, and credit, not long-distance credit transfers. So how was it done? How did they take the money?
Even supposing that Roman officials, as Josephus suggests, did keep an eye out for the annual transportation of the Temple tax, Paul could hardly rely on them to do the same for his project. If all the money collected were put into large chests or bags—always assuming it could be carried, perhaps on mules—it would be an obvious target in every port, at every wayside inn, on every lonely stretch of road. By traveling as a group (and perhaps recruiting extra traveling companions from the local areas through which they were passing to help guard them for that stretch of the journey) they may have felt sufficiently secure. On board ship, travelers had to sleep on deck and provide their own food, so we may assume that the whole company would form and maintain a tight group. It is possible that friends converted the money into a comparatively small number of high-value coins or bars of gold or silver, which could then be carried less obviously. One way or another, this was a dangerous undertaking even allowing for the normal hazards of ancient travel. They must have been glad when they eventually arrived in Jerusalem, though that is another story to which we must return.
* * *
The journey was notable for two particular moments. The first is the famous scene, a kind of tragicomedy, that took place when the group had reached Troas. On the eve of their departure for Assos on the next leg of their journey, Paul was speaking at a crowded meeting. He went on and on, later and later into the night, and a young man named Eutychus was sitting by an upstairs window in a warm room . . .
This anecdote was presumably intended to remind Luke’s readers of Paul’s healing powers, but in its sharp depiction of an otherwise unlikely scene it keeps us on track in our view of Paul himself. He had, we remember, just written Romans, itself a highly compressed account of things he could have spelled out at much more length. We can well imagine his walking through the arguments again: Adam, Abraham, Exodus, David, exile, Isaiah, the Psalms, the Messiah—with the shocking break in the story at this point: nobody expected the Messiah to be crucified and raised from the dead! Then he would go on to the promise of the worldwide inheritance and the bodily resurrection in the ultimate new creation; to the need for Jesus’s followers to be united, to renounce idols and sexual immorality; to the ways in which Jewish law was both utterly fulfilled and utterly transcended in Jesus and the spirit. And more, and more. Questions would fly to and fro, with his answers ranging across scripture, story, and missionary anecdotes. We can imagine interruptions, discussion, and the vivid debating style he had used in parts of Romans itself (“What shall we say, then?” “But supposing . . .” “Or does God only belong to the Jews?” and so on.) We can imagine the company pausing for prayer, to sing a hymn, or to allow someone to look up one of the scriptural passages Paul had been quoting from memory and read it out loud again for the benefit of the larger group. And then Paul starts up once more . . .
And Eutychus, the young man by the window, is overcome with sleep as Paul goes on and on. He falls out of the window, crashes to the ground below, and appears to be dead. Paul rushes downstairs, stoops over the young man, and picks him up, reviving him. They break bread and eat together. He then carries on with his discourse until dawn, almost as if nothing had happened.11 Then it is time to go. Some of Luke’s readers, pondering this passage, might imagine Paul as a second Socrates, discussing philosophy all night and then going about his normal business.12
The second significant moment on the journey came when the party landed at Miletus, south of Ephesus. (Like Ephesus itself, Miletus is now some distance from the sea; the mouths of their respective rivers have silted up over time.) As we saw, Luke explains Paul’s decision to bypass Ephesus itself on the grounds that he was eager to be in Jerusalem in time for Pentecost. That may well have been part of the motive, but I think it equally likely that Paul was anxious not be drawn into a difficult or dangerous situation, and that he may also have been concerned about bringing his small party, guarding a substantial sum of money, into a bustling city. These potential dangers are, indeed, reflected in the address he then gave to the elders of the church who had come from Ephesus to meet him. The distance would have been around thirty miles as the crow flies, but longer by road, perhaps two or even three days’ journey in each direction.
The speech that Luke ascribes to Paul on this occasion, like the very different address on the Areopagus in Athens, would take less than three minutes to deliver. As with that occasion, we must assume that Paul would have spoken for a good deal longer. If the elders were taking the best part of a week to travel to Miletus and back again, they and Paul would probably have wanted to take at least a full day to talk. This would have included Paul saying the sort of things we find here, only at much more length.
Paul is saying farewell, and the speech has the flavor of a final testament. He is still hoping and praying that he will make it to Rome and then to Spain. But as he contemplates the trip to Jerusalem, he has a strong suspicion, which he takes to be given by the spirit, that he ought to be preparing for trouble in some form or other. It was therefore appropriate to look back at his own work in Ephesus and to look forward to what might now be facing the church there. No doubt Luke, wanting to present a rounded picture of Paul’s work, had his own reasons for giving this speech such space. But from it all we get a vivid portrait of Paul at work.
We see in particular Paul the pastor, out and about, visiting the homes of Jesus-followers as well as teaching in public. He remembers the suffering brought upon him because of the plots of the local Jewish community, and he refers to the same torments that had caused him to despair in those dreadful months a year or more earlier. But his message, as ever, is the same, the Jewish message reshaped around Jesus: people should turn from idols and serve the living God now made known in Jesus. That message has not changed from his early days, and it was still what a great pagan city needed to hear. He has been sensitive, ever since the Galatian crisis, to the possible charge that he might have trimmed the message down, might have given them only part of the truth and not the whole thing. No, he says, on that score he is blameless. He had not shrunk from declaring and explaining to them the entire divine plan.
After working our way through the main letters, seeing the way Paul relished laying it all out, making the connections between different biblical themes and tying them all together with Jesus and the spirit, we may find any suggestion that he would be omitting bits and pieces faintly ridiculous. One might as well accuse Gustav Mahler of making his symphonies too short. But it wasn’t just a matter of Paul enjoying the big picture and the little details. The way he puts it implies that holding anything back would make him guilty of jeopardizing people’s salvation. He was innocent; he had told them the whole story. And, like a refrain, he reminds them of his tireless labors among them and of the way in which he worked with his own hands to support his preaching and teaching. They had had plenty of time to observe him, night and day, and they would know that he had earned his own keep and had not been angling for special treats or favors.
But Paul wasn’t simply reflecting on his own time in Ephesus. He was also warning the elders about what might be waiting for them just around the corner. He had, he says, often warned them with tears about the dangers all around them, and now he could see those dangers looming all the larger. The world of idolatry and immorality was powerful and insidious, and there were many, including perhaps some who had once professed Christian faith, who were being drawn into it. It had happened in Corinth, and it would happen again in various places. Paul grieves over any who even start down that road, and he urges them, with powerful emotion, to turn back. In particular, he has given them an example by his own refusal to be drawn into the snares of materialist culture. He wasn’t in this preaching and teaching business for money, and nor should they be.
This personal testimony seems designed to rule out, or to head off before it can get going, the kind of criticism he had experienced behind his back after he had left Corinth. But, all the same, Paul knew that difficulties lay ahead. The elders from Ephesus were like shepherds, put there to guard a flock of sheep, and since the flock in question was “the church of God, which he purchased with his very own blood”—one of the most striking early Christian statements of the meaning of Jesus’s crucifixion—they must take great care.13 There would be wolves. There always are. Some of them would be former shepherds themselves—perhaps some among those listening to him right now!—who would distort the truth and draw people away after them. Perhaps half of Paul’s letters were written because this sort of thing had already happened, in Galatia, in Corinth, and elsewhere. It wasn’t a new problem. It remained acute.
But this farewell address wasn’t simply about Paul and about the dangers facing the church. It was about God and about Jesus. It would hardly be true to Paul if these were not the ultimate focal points. “I commit you to God,” he says, “and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and give you the inheritance among all those whom God has sanctified.”14 God’s word of grace was the powerful word of the cross, the life-transforming word of the gospel, the word that started in the ancient scriptures and told the story reaching forward to the explosive new event of Jesus himself. And it was Jesus himself whom Paul invoked at the end. Just as the Jerusalem leaders had urged him to “remember the poor,” so Paul urged the Ephesians to “work to help the weak,” since Jesus himself had said (in a saying unrecorded elsewhere), “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”15 That was how the church was to be known—as the community that modeled the outgoing, generous grace of God. That was how it would confront the principalities and powers who were all out for their own ends. That was why, no doubt, the wolves would come in to snatch what they could; this kind of community was by its very nature vulnerable, and would always be. Loyalty would be contested. But God’s grace and God’s word were stronger, and like good wholesome food they would build up the church’s strength, nourishing the believers and their leaders so that they would indeed “inherit the kingdom,” the worldwide inheritance promised to the Messiah and his people.
Paul explained that this would be his last visit. He had other plans now, and he did not envisage any return to Asia Minor. They were upset, distraught, but his mind was made up. His face, like that of his master, was turned toward Jerusalem, but then, unlike Jesus, toward Rome.
They knelt down to pray. Then, after more embraces, they brought him to his ship.
* * *
Paul could never say he hadn’t been warned. People kept telling him he was in for trouble in Jerusalem. The travelers changed ships at Patara, on the coast of Lycia in southwest Asia, and then headed for Tyre on the Syrian coast. The Jesus-followers there urged Paul not to go to Jerusalem, but he would not be deflected. They continued via Ptolemais, just a little south, and ended up at Caesarea, staying with Philip and his daughters. There Agabus, a prophet from Jerusalem, warned Paul that the Judaeans in Jerusalem would tie him hand and foot and hand him over to the Gentiles. Everyone pleaded with Paul not to go. But we are not surprised, knowing him as we now do, that he resisted. It broke his heart that they were so affectionate and concerned for him, but he was quite prepared not only to be tied up, but to die for the name of Jesus, if that should prove to be God’s will. They relented. The travelers moved on. Finally they arrived in Jerusalem at last. It was, most likely, the early autumn of AD 57.
No one who has made that journey, in ancient or in modern times, forgets it. The Holy City. Jerusalem the golden. The place where the living God had promised to put his name, had promised to install his king as ruler of the nations. The place where, Paul believed, these promises had come true—with Jesus enthroned outside the city wall, doing once and for all what only Israel’s One God could do and then being exalted as Lord of the world. How could he not go there one more time?
But how could he possibly go to Jerusalem in full public view when so many in the city, including so many Jesus-followers who were “zealous for the law”—as Paul himself had been!—would hear about his coming and react with anger and perhaps violence? This was a problem for the Jerusalem leaders as much as for Paul. One would have hoped that the collection would have provided a welcome sign of mutual acceptance, but to our frustration Luke never mentions it. We simply do not know what happened to the money. Reading Paul’s letters, watching him carefully organize the collection and its equally careful transportation, we are like people watching all but the last ten minutes of a great sporting event on television, when a sudden power outage stops us from finding out who won.
Luke was not writing to answer our questions. Perhaps he wanted to distract attention from the whole episode. Perhaps Paul and his friends had presented the money, only to have it refused on the grounds that it came from “tainted” Gentile sources. Or perhaps it was accepted, but made little difference to the public perception of Paul and his missionary activity. Perhaps, as sometimes happens, this unexpected and generous gift divided the local church between those who wanted to receive it in the spirit it was given and those who were afraid they were being bribed into overlooking or colluding with what they saw as Paul’s notoriously lax attitude toward the Torah. (Perhaps there were long memories of the earlier visit when Paul and Barnabas had come to Jerusalem with money—and also with Titus, whom some had wanted to circumcise.) In any case, since for this period we are entirely dependent on Luke for information and since he has chosen not to mention the collection at all, we cannot tell. We can only hope. (Nor, for that matter, does Luke mention Titus. That is a well-known problem to which there is no obvious solution, but it is no more problematic than the small-scale puzzles one repeatedly meets in ancient history.)
When Paul and his friends arrived in Jerusalem at last, they stayed with Mnason, who like Barnabas was originally from Cyprus. The Jerusalem leaders, while welcoming the news of what Paul and his colleagues had done in the years since they last met, came up with a plan to quiet any potential anti-Pauline feeling in Jerusalem before it even got going. What they proposed was that Paul join four others who had taken a vow and would undergo a rite of purification in the Temple. This was a variation on the earlier theme where Paul, after his first visit to Corinth, had taken a vow. As before, it is perfectly reasonable to suppose that Paul would have continued, as a Jesus-follower, with various Jewish devotional practices designed to direct the mind and heart toward worship, humility, and service.
The Jerusalem leaders hoped their plan would head off the “zealots” among the local Jesus-followers. Those “zealots,” after all, were firmly convinced that, because of Jesus, God was now going to complete his long-term plan to get rid of the hated Gentile rulers and give freedom to Israel once and for all. But if other people claiming to follow Jesus were going soft on their devotion to God and his law, and teaching yet other people to go soft on it as well, then the whole divine purpose would be in jeopardy. So what Paul needed to do was to demonstrate his loyalty to the law by joining a group who had taken a vow of purity. He could share the same vow and actually pay their expenses as well (a good use for some of the collection monies?). Then it would be clear that the rumors and gossip about him, all the accusations that he was teaching people to ignore the law, were untrue.
This plan has the same sense of naïveté about it that we recall from the letter drafted after the Jerusalem Conference nearly a decade earlier. Like a British politician who never stirs out of Westminster or an American banker who never travels away from Wall Street except to visit other banks in Frankfurt or Tokyo, there is a sense of unreality, of the Jerusalem leaders failing to see how the complexities of real life might ruin the neat ideas.
And, indeed, the Jerusalem leaders do now remind Paul that they had written to the Jesus-believing Gentiles about keeping away from anything to do with idolatry and immorality, including meat that had been sacrificed in pagan temples. One can imagine Paul’s heart sinking at this reference to the document that had really been designed, like the supposed “division of labor” in Galatians 2:9, as an expedient to allow mutual recognition while things went forward. He knows, from years of facing actual pastoral situations in Corinth, Ephesus, and elsewhere—and from hammering out the first theological principles that related to those situations, particularly in 1 Corinthians 8–10 and Romans 14–15—that things are much more complicated than the “apostolic letter” had allowed. He has remained true to the absolute prohibition on idolatry and immorality. But he has come to the conclusion, on good biblical grounds, that all meat is in fact “clean” and that nothing is “impure” unless someone’s bad conscience made it so.16 The “letter” had been well intentioned, but the realities on the ground meant that it could only ever be a starting position. Was the new plan, Paul must have wondered, going to be a similar mixture of good intentions and unreal expectations?
His own position on the matters covered by the “letter” was not, after all, a mere pragmatic compromise. It was a statement of strong theological principle. Some early Christians would have agreed with him, pointing out that the line he was taking had the backing of Jesus himself, or at least of Mark’s view of what Jesus had meant at one point. In Mark, Jesus’s cryptic remark about things passing through the stomach and out of the body without causing defilement is taken to indicate that “all foods are clean.”17 Paul had, in any case, moved on a long way since the Jerusalem Conference. His churches had been taught to think theologically at a depth far beyond what was implied in the rather simplistic “letter.” He must have felt like a serious musician who, having played in top concert halls around the world, returned home and was invited to admire someone playing a few old tunes in the pub down the road. He could understand and respect what they were saying, but he knew a larger world.
But maybe, just maybe, their new plan might work. He goes ahead with the ritual of purification. He makes the declaration. (Those who suppose that the “real Paul,” being a good Protestant, would never have done anything like this have missed the point. Paul’s gospel did not make him opposed to the Temple and its sacrificial system. Just because he believed that Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice, that did not mean that following the Levitical code was now sinful.) The purificatory ritual takes a week—it must have seemed a very long week to Paul and his anxious friends—after which Paul and the other men enter the Temple. Has the ruse worked? Have they gotten away with it? Will the Jerusalem church be spared the embarrassment—and more than embarrassment—of being associated with a notoriously traitorous character? Will Paul be spared the outcry that might so easily follow?
The answer is no. Only now it’s even worse than they had feared. They had been worried that Paul would be accused of fomenting lawbreaking among diaspora Jews. The actual charge is one higher. He is now accused of deliberately defiling the Temple itself. In trying to avoid a road accident, they have stepped on the accelerator rather than the brake. They would have done better to keep Paul away from the Temple altogether. The evidence for the charge of attempted defilement is of course circumstantial and slight, but that wouldn’t stop an angry crowd. The trouble began, Luke explains, with some Jews from Asia, people who had known of Paul in Ephesus. (Everybody in Ephesus, we recall, had known who Paul was.) So much, Paul might have thought grimly, for coming back for the festival. Lots of other Jews had had the same idea; people came to Jerusalem from all over the world of the Diaspora. Some of them, already hostile to him, would think the worst. And so much for trying to calm people down by coming into the Temple however carefully, however ritually pure.
These diaspora Jews now formulate the charge that will resonate throughout the next five chapters of Acts. Here he is, they say; this is the fellow who’s been going around the world teaching everybody to disobey the law and to disregard the Temple! (How Paul must have longed to explain to them the difference between abolition and fulfillment. But then, as now, when people are angry, they can read things whichever way they please.) And here he is in person, they say. Not content with charging around the world spreading this anti-Jewish heresy, he’s come here to Jerusalem and has brought his pagan friends into the Temple so that he can prove his point by polluting our holy place . . .
What had Paul done? Luke explains that these men from Ephesus had seen him in the city with Trophimus, another Ephesian and a Gentile, and assumed that Paul had taken him into the Temple, past the sign that warned Gentiles to keep out. The assumption was false, but the damage was done. Paul, we may assume, braced himself wearily, knowing what to expect, like someone bathing in the sea who, too late, realizes that a huge wave is bearing down on him and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. With a rush, people in the mob seize him and start to beat him up. He is kicked and punched, slapped and scratched. He only escapes with his life because the Roman tribune on duty, hearing the uproar, quickly intervenes and arrests him. The tribune can’t figure out what the problem is (here, as with the riot in Ephesus, most of the crowd has little idea what is really happening), so he gives the order for Paul to be brought into the barracks. The soldiers carry Paul over the heads of the angry crowd. They reach comparative safety. We sense the door being shut, the roar of the mob still audible but now at bay.
How Paul could talk coherently after all this is not clear, but he has come too far to lapse into passivity now. He wants, above all, to be able to speak to the people. They are zealous for God and the law; he is zealous for God and his son—and he remembers only too well the time when he thought just as they do. They are his people, the kind of people over whom he had grieved,18 for whom he had prayed,19 the people who, he believed, might not forever “remain in unbelief.”20 If he cannot speak to them, who can? After all, Paul has recently stayed up all night explaining to an eager group in Troas what the scriptures really meant, how it all fitted together, why his own mission was part of the plan stretching back to Adam and Abraham and forward to the ultimate renewal of heaven and earth. He has just written it out, a few weeks before, with great care and artistry, in what he must have known was a work of literary skill as well as theological and pastoral power and passion. He wants, he yearns, he longs above all things at that moment to be allowed to say all this to the angry crowd.
So he asks the tribune for permission. Actually, he begins by asking permission to speak to the tribune himself, which sets in motion an odd little dialogue. The tribune has assumed that Paul is the Egyptian rabble-rouser mentioned by Josephus and other Jewish traditions, the man who had led a band of hopefuls into the desert with promises that he would accomplish God’s coming liberation. It isn’t quite clear whether, hearing Paul speak Greek, the tribune has his guess confirmed (an Egyptian might be expected to speak Greek) or whether, hearing Paul speak a better standard of Greek, he is now questioning his original assumption. But it gives Paul the opportunity to introduce himself, to say that he is a Jew from Tarsus. No wonder he can speak good Greek. His native city is a place of culture and renown. So, having gotten that sorted out, he requests, and is granted, permission to speak to the crowd who a minute before were baying for his blood.
* * *
It was a noble effort, but it was doomed to failure. Paul’s speech from the steps of the Roman barracks gained attention when the crowd realized he was now speaking in the local language, Aramaic. They listened politely, perhaps in a mixture of suspicion and surprise, as he rehearsed his early life, not least his zeal for the law in Jerusalem itself. The story of his meeting with Jesus is of course spectacular, as is the immediate sequel, in which the devout, law-observant Ananias comes at the Lord’s bidding to enable the opening of his eyes. So far, so good.
But then came the critical moment, the moment where Paul needed to expound the fulfillment of the scriptural promises about all nations coming to worship Israel’s God. He longed in particular to explain that to them and then to explain the ways in which this inclusion of Gentiles was the true fulfillment of the Torah predicted by Moses and the prophets. He was itching to explain as well how it was that Jesus the Messiah, as promised by God to King David, was the ultimate means by which the great Temple promises had come true, how the divine glory was dwelling bodily in him and by his spirit dwelling also now in his followers. Paul had not been cynically breaking the law. He certainly had not been defiling the Temple. He deeply respected and cherished them both. He had been loyal. But when God sends Israel a crucified Messiah . . .
That was what Paul wanted to say, but he never got the chance. He sprang the trap too soon by saying that the risen Jesus had said he was sending Paul to the Gentiles. That was enough. The crowd had been ready to see him as a compromiser, and now their suspicions were confirmed. He was the sort who had given up the Torah, who had no time for the Temple, who’d made friends with their enemies, with the monsters who were oppressing God’s people. He’s polluted himself, they said, and now he wants to pollute the rest of us. He will get his reward, no doubt, when God judges the world, but he ought to have it right now! “Away with him from the face of the earth! Someone like that has no right to live!”21
Faced with a troublesome prisoner, a Roman tribune would normally use torture to find out what was going on. It was assumed that nobody would tell the truth or the whole truth unless it was forced out of them. But once again the tribune was in for a surprise. Just as when he faced down the magistrates in Philippi, Paul revealed his secret to the officer standing by: “Is it lawful to flog a Roman citizen without first finding him guilty?”22
The question was rhetorical. Paul knew the answer, and so did the officer. They both also knew that it wasn’t just unlawful; it was very unwise. If a citizen were to report such a thing, the roles could easily be reversed, and the officers involved would themselves face severe punishment.
This naturally raises another question. How could Paul prove his claim of citizenship? To make a false claim, especially under such circumstances, would be a serious crime, possibly a capital offense. In Rome, citizens would wear a toga, but it is highly unlikely that Paul was doing so on this occasion (even supposing that his clothes were recognizable after his near lynching). The other mark, which we may be sure Paul had kept safe about his person all along, perhaps on a chain or string, was the small wooden badge (known as a diploma) that, much like a passport, gave official details of who he was and where his citizenship was registered. The tribune raises an eyebrow: “It cost me a lot of money to buy this citizenship,” he said. “Ah,” Paul replied, “but it came to me by birth.”23 That was enough. The torturers were told to stand down. But the tribune still had no idea what was actually going on. Having failed to find out either from the crowd or from Paul himself, he called the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin.
We should know by now what to expect. Paul believed firmly that the One God had created all the power structures of the world—and that when they stepped out of line, they ought to be reminded of the fact. Never one for a soft approach (had he ever really pondered Proverbs 15:1, advising that a gentle answer turns away anger?), he was much more inclined to get his retaliation in first. So, without waiting for anyone to accuse him of anything, he insisted that throughout his life he had kept a clear conscience before the One God of Israel. He had been loyal. At this, the high priest ordered him to be struck on the mouth. As in the trial of Jesus,24 this was a standard if violent way of saying symbolically “You ought not to be speaking in your own defense, because you are obviously guilty. You should shut your mouth, and if you don’t, we’ll shut it for you.”
Paul wasn’t having it. “God will strike you, you whitewashed wall!” he responded. “You’re sitting to judge me according to the law, and yet you order me to be struck in violation of the law?”25 If part of the charge was that he had failed to be sufficiently zealous for the Torah, he would show right from the start that he knew that the Torah required fair play for the accused. What he had not taken into account was that the person addressing him was the high priest himself; the bystanders quickly informed him of this. So now he was in the wrong for speaking like that to someone in high office. Paul knew, however, that when you did something wrong without intending to do so—“unwilling” or “unwitting” sin—this required only an apology and ultimately a sin offering. “I didn’t know,” he said, “he was the high priest.”26 Again, Paul knew as well as they did that scripture required respect for office.27
This brought the bizarre back-and-forth of insult and accusation to a standstill, but Paul wasn’t going to leave it there. He at once seized the initiative. He had come of age in Jerusalem; he had studied with Gamaliel; he knew very well where the flash points would come. He knew that though the gathering would have liked to present a united front, there were deep ideological differences, represented broadly by the aristocratic Sadducees and the populist pressure group, the Pharisees, with their revolutionary dream of the resurrection hope of Israel. Now was the time to drop a small bomb into this august company. “My brothers,” he shouted to the whole assembly. (Brothers! Now, there’s a thought.) “I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees. This trial is about the hope, about the resurrection of the dead!”
This really put the cat among the pigeons, as he knew it would. At once the Pharisees in the gathering rallied to his defense. They hadn’t quite understood what he meant, but if the game was now Pharisees versus Sadducees (rather than Sanhedrin versus heretics), they knew which side they were on. The reason for their confusion goes to the heart of the difference between what the young Saul of Tarsus had believed and what Paul the Apostle had come to believe.
“Resurrection,” as far as they were concerned, was something that would happen to everybody at the end of time, but that meant that those who had died were still alive in some form in the interval before that final event. Lacking, just as we do, good, unambiguous language for this intermediate state, they sometimes spoke of the dead as having an “angelic” existence and sometimes of them as now being “spirits”; in both cases, the people were still alive but were awaiting a resurrection body on the last day. This enabled the Pharisees to cut Paul some slack; maybe, they thought, when he had spoken of meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus, what he had actually seen and heard was an “angel” or a “spirit,” somebody still alive in this intermediate state.
The early Jesus-followers would see in an instant that this wasn’t the point. As far as they were concerned, with Paul as their most articulate representative, the whole point was that to their astonishment Jesus had gone on ahead and was already raised from the dead, ahead of everybody else. But Paul’s initiative had made it impossible for the meeting to continue. The charges about observing the law and defiling the Temple were forgotten, at least for the moment. The gathering broke up in disorder. Once again the Roman tribune had to rescue Paul from an angry gathering, only this time it was the senior Jerusalem court rather than the city mob.
How does Paul react to that small triumph? We watch as the tribune’s men frog-march him back to the barracks and lock him up for the night. Paul is used to this, of course, and at least he and the tribune seem to have established some kind of rapport. Paul might wish that his own fellow Jews would be more sympathetic, but by now he may be getting a sense that, as in Corinth, a Roman official standing outside the immediate controversy might be a better ally. He prays the evening prayers. The bed is hard, but he has had an exhausting day. He sleeps . . .
And the next thing he knows Jesus is standing there beside him. The last time this happened was in Corinth, and Jesus told him to stay there and not be afraid. Now he’s telling him he will have to move on. He has given his evidence in Jerusalem. Now he will have to do the same thing in Rome. So, Paul thinks, that’s how it’s going to happen. For the last year or two he has had a strong sense that he ought to be heading for Rome, but it had looked as though the Jerusalem visit might put an end to that, and to everything else as well. But now he sees how it might be done. This wasn’t the way he had planned it, but maybe, just maybe, this is what had to happen. Twice now the tribune has rescued him from violence. Perhaps that is a sign. Perhaps the Roman system as a whole, despite its creaky bureaucracy and careless pagan attitude toward life, will now be the means by which he will be rescued from the threats that are reaching a crescendo.
If that thought crossed his mind, it was vindicated the next day by another strange incident. Forty Torah-zealous Jews swore a solemn oath not to eat or drink until they had killed Paul. Their plot was simple. They would have Paul brought back to the Sanhedrin and assassinate him in transit. Unfortunately for them, news leaked out. To our surprise, since this is the only mention of Paul’s family in the whole narrative, Paul’s sister’s son heard about it. (This opens in a flash a window on other questions: How many relatives did Paul have in Jerusalem? Were some of them Jesus-followers? We do not know.) The lad came to tell Paul, and Paul got him to tell the tribune.
The tribune, who must have been wondering what on earth to do next, knew exactly how to meet this challenge. He ordered two centurions with a hundred soldiers each, seventy horsemen, and an additional two hundred light-armed guards to take Paul to Caesarea, the best part of a hundred miles away, where the governor was based. That night they got as far as Antipatris, roughly halfway; by then the conspirators must have realized they had lost their chance. The soldiers then returned to Jerusalem, and the horsemen and guards took Paul on to Caesarea itself.
The tribune, Claudius Lysias, wrote a cover letter to the governor in which he expressed a view not dissimilar to the one Gallio had taken in Corinth. This fellow, he said, has been accused in relation to disputes concerning Jewish law, but he has not been charged with any crime for which he would deserve to die or to be imprisoned. The Roman viewpoint seems to be that this is all about internal Jewish disputes. Nothing for them to bother about, except insofar as they need to keep the peace, and for whatever reason that seems to become harder when this man is around.
So Paul is handed on to the provincial governor himself. The governor at the time was Antonius Felix. Originally a freedman, Felix had risen quickly up the social scale as a favorite of the emperor Claudius; he was a brother of Pallas, one of Claudius’s right-hand men. Felix was a callous, corrupt official who had squashed a rebellion, instigated the murder of a high priest, and, rather like Gallio when the mob beat up Sosthenes in Corinth, stood by as Jews in Caesarea were attacked by a local crowd. He was, however, married to a Jewish princess (his third wife), Drusilla, a daughter of Herod Agrippa. There was at least a small chance that he might listen favorably to a plea from the Jewish hierarchy.
When the Jewish leaders arrive, annoyed no doubt at being made to come to Caesarea, they bring their accusations, using a professional attorney who might be expected to frame things in a way that would get the governor’s attention. “We find this fellow,” says the attorney, “to be a public nuisance. He stirs up civil strife among all the Jews, all over the world. He is a ringleader in the sect of the Nazoreans. He even tried to defile the Temple!”28 This is the usual tactic, taking an originally Jewish charge and “translating” it into a charge of public disturbance. The Jewish leaders know there is no point trying to get the governor to adjudicate a specifically Jewish question. Temple defilement, however, is something anyone in the ancient world would understand; people in every city, in every subculture would shudder at the thought.
Paul, of course, is having none of it. He simply denies the basic charge of fomenting civil unrest. He wasn’t disputing in the Temple, he wasn’t stirring up a crowd. He has in any case been in Jerusalem for less than two weeks. However, they are right that he is a follower of the Way, which they call a “sect”; but this is because he is convinced that what has happened in Jesus is the fulfillment, not the abrogation, of the law and the prophets. There will be a resurrection of both the righteous and the unrighteous (none of Paul’s letters make this point, since they focus on the resurrection of the righteous only). But for that reason, as he had said before the Sanhedrin, Paul has always kept his conscience clear before God and all people. He has, though, been a loyal Jew, even though—actually, he would say, precisely because—that loyalty has been reshaped around Israel’s Messiah.
So what had Paul been doing? What account will he give of himself, not just to rebut the charges, but to explain why he had come to Jerusalem in the first place? He opens with a powerful point. Far from intending to stir up trouble for the Jewish people, his journey was motivated by the desire to help: for years he had been collecting money to bring “to his nation.” That had brought him to the city, and that’s what took him into the Temple, properly purified and devout, without any crowds or fuss. The trouble was caused, he says, by “some Jews from Asia”;29 as in Philippians 1 and the scene in Ephesus itself, we catch the sense that some of Paul’s fiercest and most determined opponents came, for whatever reason, from the Jewish community in Ephesus itself. Paul knows that they would have far more Jewish-specific complaints than the generalized charge of fomenting civil unrest that the attorney had presented, so he proposes that they should come themselves and bring their accusations against him.
Or perhaps, he says as an afterthought, the real problem has to do with what he said in the Sanhedrin. This is a tease, and the Jewish hierarchy will know it but will not be able to do anything about it. Yes, of course, Paul had shouted out to them that what was at stake was the Jewish hope of resurrection. He was claiming the high ground; his whole raison d’être was that this Jewish hope, as seen by the Pharisees at least, had been accomplished in Jesus. He was not, in other words, opposed to the Jews and their way of life. He was celebrating its fulfillment.
Felix defers judgment. He and Drusilla call the battered apostle in and let him talk. He explains one more time—but Paul is not complaining about having another opportunity to announce the good news—who Jesus is, why according to scripture he is Israel’s Messiah, and what this means with regard to the coming final judgment, the justice of God, and the gospel challenge to a life of self-control. Felix hasn’t exercised self-control for a long time, if ever, and has long considered all ultimate judgment to be a matter of Roman justice, with Roman justice itself being open to manipulation in return for a consideration. Felix stops Paul in his tracks. Quite enough for now, he says. But he is hoping—granted that Paul seems to have access to funds—that he might be good for a bribe. So he calls him in again and again. But after two years there is still no bribe, and Felix comes to the end of his time in office.
At that point he could have released Paul. Although his primary motive had always been self-interest, his hope for a bribe had waned, and his attention had now shifted to the normal anxiety of a provincial governor returning to Rome—he did not want to get into trouble. (His original patron, Claudius, had now been succeeded by Nero.) He therefore wanted a good report from his Jewish subjects. So he left Paul in prison to await the mercy, or otherwise, of the incoming governor, Portius Festus.
Once again Luke has presented all this as a fast-paced drama, action packed and with plenty of colorful characters. We can read it through in a few minutes. But we should not lose sight of the fact that it has all taken two years. Paul had written his letter to Rome in 57 and had arrived in Jerusalem late the same year. It was now 59 (Festus’s arrival as governor can be dated to that year). He had, for the moment, escaped death. But Roman custody was still Roman custody, and even though he was clearly allowed to have friends visit him and bring him what he needed, there was a sense of marking time, of an unpleasant and unwanted hiatus. He knew that a belief in providence always constituted a call to patience, but even so, this was getting ridiculous. Jesus had promised him that he would be going to Rome. He had guessed that this might mean that Rome would itself take him there. But how would that happen if Rome kept sending corrupt officials who were uninterested in moving things along?
The answer came—and Paul must have been pondering this for quite some time—when the new governor, Festus, held a brief hearing in Caesarea. Jewish speakers once more hurled all kinds of accusations at Paul. He responded by insisting once more on the three all-important points: he had committed no offense against Jewish law or the Temple: or, for that matter, against Caesar. Why he mentioned Caesar at that point is not clear, since so far as we know nobody had suggested that he was guilty of any kind of treason against the emperor. However, the sequel may show what Paul had in mind.
But first we see a typical move. Festus, uninterested in justice but wanting to do the Jews a favor, suggested that they should hold a trial in Jerusalem. Paul, remembering the earlier plot, knew perfectly well where that would lead. It was time to play the card he had held up his sleeve all this time:
I am standing before Caesar’s tribunal, which is where I ought to be tried. I have done no wrong to the Jews, as you well know. If I have committed any wrong, or if I have done something which means I deserve to die, I’m not trying to escape death. But if I have done none of the things they are accusing me of, nobody can hand me over to them. I appeal to Caesar.30
An appeal of this kind was not an appeal against sentence. No sentence had been passed, since no verdict had been reached. It was an appeal that the entire case should be passed up to the highest possible court. It was, of course, a risky move. Caesar might have all sorts of reasons for wanting the case to go this way or that and might well not take kindly to a Jew whose reputation as a world-roving troublemaker would go before him. But if the only alternative was to start again in Jerusalem, with all the attendant risks, then this, however unexpected, was the way by which he would get to Rome at last. Festus consulted his advisers, but he surely knew the answer already. Paul had appealed to Caesar, and to Caesar he would go.
But he could not be sent without an account of the case, a statement of the facts. How then would Festus discover “the facts” in this case? An opportunity presented itself. Herod Agrippa II, a flamboyant character with an equally flamboyant wife, Bernice, was coming to greet Festus as the newly arrived governor. (The relationship between Roman governors and the local aristocracy was complex, but both sides usually realized that it was better to have some kind of mutual understanding. Many ordinary Jews would despise them both, though this particular Herod was less unpopular than most of his family had been.) Festus explained to Agrippa who Paul was and the nature of the problem, including the telling comment: “It turned out to have to do with various wranglings concerning their own religion, and about some dead man called Jesus whom Paul asserted was alive.”31 This sounds very much like Gallio’s response to the charges against Paul in Acts 18 and the similar statement by the tribune who had written to Felix in Acts 23: from the Jewish point of view Paul might be introducing dangerous new elements into traditional formulations, but from the Roman point of view this just looked like wrangling over words. At least Festus had grasped the central point at issue, that this all concerned the resurrection of Jesus, though he professed not to understand why Paul wouldn’t go to Jerusalem and why, instead, he had appealed to Caesar. So, not unnaturally, Agrippa asked to hear Paul for himself.
One common view is that Luke wrote Acts to provide material in Paul’s defense. Whether it was written early enough for his trial before Nero or whether it was written a long time afterward but to make the same point in retrospect does not ultimately affect our understanding of Paul here. This is the last time we see him give his own answer to our overall questions: What made him tick, and in particular what had happened on the road to Damascus to bring it all about? And how, granted all this, might we explain how the movement launched by this strange, enigmatic but energetic man would become so successful so quickly?
Paul’s speech before Agrippa, Bernice, Festus, and their retinue is longer than either the Areopagus address or the farewell address to the Ephesian elders. Like them, however, it must be a great deal shorter than what Paul actually said on that occasion. However, this speech presses so many of the buttons that we have seen again and again in Paul’s own writings that we can be sure it summarizes fairly accurately what was said. The main upshot of it all—and this is why an earlier generation of readers, determined to stop Paul from being “Jewish,” rejected the portrait in Acts!—is that Paul had been a loyal Jew from the start. He was acting as a loyal Jew at the time when he met Jesus on the road; his mission in the wider world had been on behalf of Israel’s God, who was now claiming the whole world as his own; and he was simply doing his best to tell the world what Moses and the prophets had been saying all along, namely, “that the Messiah would suffer, that he would be the first to rise from the dead, and that he would proclaim light to the people and to the nations.”32 Paul had always been, and still remained, a loyal Jew. That was the whole point.
It was the point he wanted to make to Herod Agrippa II, who might just have been able to wield some influence on wider Jewish opinion. It was the point he wanted to make in the face of the accusations of disloyalty, of treating the Torah too loosely and plotting to desecrate the Temple. It was the point Luke wanted to make as well whenever he was writing—that despite the repeated accusations, Paul was not trying to overthrow the Jewish tradition, culture, and way of life. It was just that, as other loyal Jews have supposed from time to time, he believed that Israel’s Messiah had appeared, that he knew the Messiah’s name and his qualifications, and that this Messiah had done something much more powerful than merely defeating a pagan army. He had overthrown the dark powers that had kept the nations in captivity; he had built a new “Temple,” a worldwide community in which the divine glory had come to dwell by the spirit; and he had now sent out messengers to tell the nations what devout Jews had wanted to tell them all along, that they should turn from idols to serve the living God. All this is built into Paul’s account of what Jesus said to him in their first meeting and into Paul’s own account of what he had been doing as a result.
The heart of the speech is of course the third and final account in Acts of the appearance of Jesus to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. This time the story is at its fullest. No doubt Luke, editing all three versions, has arranged them in a crescendo. And this fuller version gives us yet another angle on our underlying questions of what made Paul the man he was, what the Damascus Road event had done to him, and why his work bore fruit beyond his dreams.
The opening challenge has become proverbial. As in the two other versions, Jesus asks Saul why he is persecuting him, but this time he adds a wry comment: “It’s hard for you, this kicking against the goads.”33 This is an allusion to a well-known Greek proverb about humans trying to resist the divine will, which is exactly what Saul’s teacher, Gamaliel, had warned against.34 In the mind of Saul of Tarsus at the time, and of Paul in this speech, there is already a profound irony: Jesus, commissioning him to go and tell the polytheistic nations about the One God, is warning him about his present behavior—by using a saying from the very pagan traditions from which people must turn away! The proverb in this context, of course, is designed to show the inner tensions within the “zeal” of young Saul. This moment corresponds exactly to what Paul had written in Romans about his fellow Jews in a lament with strong autobiographical echoes:
I can testify on their behalf that they have a zeal for God; but it is not based on knowledge. They were ignorant, you see, of God’s covenant faithfulness, and they were trying to establish a covenant status of their own; so they didn’t submit to God’s faithfulness. The Messiah, you see, is the goal of the law, so that covenant membership may be available for all who believe.35
That passage, like Paul’s present speech, goes on at once to indicate that since the One God has unveiled his ultimate covenant purpose in this Messiah—this unexpected, unwanted, and indeed scandalous crucified Jesus—then the nations are to be summoned into a new kind of community. His death has defeated the dark powers that kept the nations captive, so that the stigma of idolatry, uncleanness, and immorality, which formed the wall between Israel and the Gentiles, can be done away. They can now have “forgiveness of sins, and an inheritance among those who are made holy by their faith” in Jesus.36
Scholars over the last generation have wrestled with the question of whether the focus of Paul’s gospel was either personal forgiveness or the inclusion of the Gentiles. This verse, true to what Paul says in every letter from Galatians right through to Romans, indicates that it is both—and that the two are mutually defining. Since the pagan powers had been defeated, like Pharaoh at the Exodus, all people were free to worship the One God. Since the defeat of the powers had been accomplished by Jesus’s death, through which sins were forgiven (the sins that kept humans enslaved to the powers in the first place), the barrier to Gentile inclusion in a new “sanctified” people had gone. “Forgiveness of sins” thus entails “Gentile inclusion,” and Gentile inclusion happens precisely because of “forgiveness of sins.” This is central to Paul’s understanding of the gospel from the Damascus Road experience on, for the rest of his life. He would say that it was the primary reason behind any “success” his movement would have.
For the moment, of course, Paul knew how unpopular this was bound to be and how unwelcome it had been in practice. The idea that Gentiles could repent and become true worshippers of the One God—but without becoming Jews by being circumcised, a point implicit here but perhaps wisely left unsaid—was the main reason why he was so often opposed out in the Diaspora. It was, in particular, the reason why the mob went after him in the Temple two years before, setting off the sequence of events that finally brought him face-to-face with Herod Agrippa.
But Paul stood firm. All he was doing was expounding Moses and the prophets. It was they who had said—and if Paul got the chance, he would eagerly give Agrippa chapter and verse—two things in particular. First, the Messiah “would be the first to rise from the dead.”37 There is Paul’s theology of the two-stage resurrection, as in 1 Corinthians 15, in a nutshell, in which the Messiah’s own resurrection inaugurates a new period of history and the resurrection of all his people follows later. Second, the Messiah “would proclaim light to the people and to the nations.”38
There may be a distant echo here, in Luke’s mind at least, of the song of Simeon, right back at the start of Luke’s Gospel, in which Simeon calls Jesus “a light for revelation to the nations, and glory for your people Israel.”39 But the more important echo is Isaiah 49, the text which meant so much for Paul: the Lord’s servant will not only “raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel”; God will give him “as a light to the nations, that [God’s] salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”40 This is a particularly appropriate passage for Paul to have in mind as he stands before Agrippa, since the next verse goes on:
Thus says the LORD,
the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One,
to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations,
the slave of rulers,
“Kings shall see and stand up,
princes, and they shall prostrate themselves,
because of the LORD, who is faithful,
the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.” 41
This too had its obvious resonances in Paul’s reflection on his ministry in Romans, written not long before. He quotes the end of Isaiah 52:15:
People who hadn’t been told about him will see;
People who hadn’t heard will understand.42
But the half verse immediately before declares:
So shall he startle many nations;
kings shall shut their mouths because of him.
Standing there before Caesar’s representative, on the one hand, and the current “king of the Jews,” on the other, Paul of all people would have been alive to a sense of scripture coming true, even though the listening nobility couldn’t or wouldn’t see it.
Caesar’s representative, in particular, had no intention of having his mouth shut by Paul’s message. Those who know Paul will see that this speech, even in the compressed form Luke provides, presents a clearly thought out, scripturally resourced, and coherent worldview. To Festus, however, it appeared simply a jumble of strange ideas. Paul had always known that his message would be scandalous to Jews and madness to Gentiles. He was challenging Agrippa to look beyond the scandal, and he must have known that Festus would hear nothing but madness. Right on cue, Festus responds.
“Paul,” he roars out at the top of his voice, “you’re mad! All this learning of yours has driven you crazy!”43 This is simply one more instance of what had happened in Athens, of what Paul remembered from Corinth and elsewhere. But Paul, calmly informing Festus that he is not at all mad, uses the moment to appeal directly to Agrippa. The king knows about Jesus and his followers—“After all, these things didn’t happen in a corner.” So Paul puts him on the spot: “Do you believe the prophets, King Agrippa? I know you believe them.”44
This is a clever move. Agrippa, eager to retain such popularity as he has with the Jewish people, is not going to say he doesn’t believe the prophets. But he sees very well what the next move would be: “You reckon you’re going to make me a Christian, then, and pretty quick, too, by the sound of it!”45 Whether that was intended as a sneer or as a friendly comment—since Agrippa must have realized, as Festus did not, the deep underlying coherence of all that Paul had said, granted his starting point in the revelation of the resurrected Jesus—Paul responds calmly. It is the last time we see the apostle face-to-face with high authority, and, true to form, he respects the office and appeals to the man: “I pray to God that not only you but also all who hear me today will become just as I am”—and then, with a smile and a gesture to the visible signs of his own status—“apart, of course, from these chains.”46
The royal and official parties get up to leave. They are seen shaking their heads and commenting that this man doesn’t deserve either to die or to be tied up. He could, in fact, have been set free, if only he hadn’t gone and appealed to Caesar. Luke is aware of the multiple ironies here. If Paul hadn’t appealed to Caesar, Festus would have sent him for trial in Jerusalem, and who knows what might have happened then. Because he had appealed, putting Festus in the position of needing to write an official report on the case (and he still doesn’t seem to know what he’s going to say), Festus has brought in Agrippa to hear Paul, giving Paul the opportunity to fulfill what Isaiah had said. And the appeal, though it will send Paul to Rome in chains, will at least send him to Rome. He will stand before the ultimate earthly king, and he will do so as a helpless prisoner. When he is weak, then he will be strong.