by N. T. Wright
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 kille
d 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. Fes
tus, 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.