Acts 21:27-22:29

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Having completed our series “Does it Matter,” we will now return our attention to the hair-raising drama in the book of Acts, which by divine coincidence puts flesh and blood on many of the themes we explored over the summer. If you were with us in the spring, you may remember Paul’s boundless energy, evangelizing and planting churches throughout Asia Minor and Greece. Some have estimated that in his three journeys, Paul travelled close to 8000 miles. But when Paul arrives in Jerusalem everything changes. He becomes the victim of a riotous crowd, is arrested and bound, and endures five trials that transport him from Jerusalem to Caesarea and finally to Rome. Paul the evangelist now becomes Paul the apologist, giving a defense in five trials. His defense concerns the revelation he has received (meaning, what Paul teaches is not apostasy from Judaism, but rather its fulfillment), and the integrity of his character. He is not a revolutionary, but a law-abiding Roman citizen.

Luke devotes six chapters (nearly 200 verses) to these trials, giving us a clue to their theological importance. John Stott notes that, even though Paul’s sufferings were not redemptive like Christ’s, there are significant parallels. “Both Jesus and Paul

1. were rejected by their own people, arrested without cause, and imprisoned;

2. were unjustly accused and willfully misrepresented by the false witnesses;

3. were slapped in the face in court;

4. were the hapless victims of secret Jewish plots;

5. heard the terrifying noise of a frenzied mob screaming ‘Away with him!’ and

6. were subjected to a series of 5 trials—

a. Jesus by Annas, the Sanhedrin, King Herod Antipas and twice by Pilate

Paul by the crowd, the Sanhedrin, King Herod Agrippa II and by the two procurators, Felix and Festus.”1

In his first speech, Paul gives us the second of three versions of his encounter with the risen Christ. If Luke wants us to hear Paul’s conversion three times, it suggests that he intends for us not only to take it to heart, but to learn it by heart. Why? I would answer, it is because apologetics matters! As Luke Timothy Johnson notes, “Paul is a ‘prime witness of the resurrection,’ on whose credibility a great deal rests.”2

I. Riot and Arrest in the Temple (21:27–39)

Paul’s first defense follows a riot instigated by Jews from Asia, who falsely accused Paul of bringing “Trophimus, a Gentile representative from Ephesus past the barrier that separated the Court of the Gentiles from the temple courts reserved for Jews alone.”3 The accusation was a serious one and punishable by death. The rumor that Paul desecrated the temple ignited the people’s fury. They quickly seized him and dragged him out of the inner courts and into the outer court of the Gentiles, where they beat him mercilessly. He would have died had not the Roman commander of the cohort, called the “tribune,” intervened. The tribune was Claudius Lysias, whom Luke portrays as an honest, open-minded Roman soldier, governed by rules of law. The tribune was stationed in the Fortress of Antonia, which overlooked the temple and housed a Roman garrison. It was his supreme responsibility to preserve the peace. When the news of violence reached him, he immediately dispatched soldiers to stop the violence. He arrested Paul and bound him in chains, but he was unable to determine who he was or what he had done from the enraged crowd. With considerable difficulty the soldiers were forced to carry Paul through the bloodthirsty mob screaming, “Away with him!” (Luke 23:18, 21).

Once inside the barracks, Paul, now bruised and bloody, respectfully asked the commander, “Am I permitted to speak?” The commander was startled when he heard his prisoner speaking fluent Greek. He had assumed Paul was the Egyptian terrorist who three years earlier had unsuccessfully led a large band of assassins to overthrow Jerusa