{"commentary":{"id":"jamieson-fausset-brown","name":"Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary","website":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamieson-Fausset-Brown_Bible_Commentary","licenseUrl":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/","licenseNotes":null,"licenseNotice":null,"englishName":"Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary","language":"eng","textDirection":"rtl","sha256":"db3d4c8b3c1f32ef9d1430a57392e02bda3a17aac1f9bbe398461de021a3cb13","availableFormats":["json"],"listOfBooksApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/books.json","listOfProfilesApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/profiles.json","numberOfBooks":66,"totalNumberOfChapters":1187,"totalNumberOfVerses":17056,"totalNumberOfProfiles":0,"languageName":"English","languageEnglishName":"English"},"book":{"id":"ACT","commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","name":"Acts","commonName":"Acts","introduction":"THIS book is to the Gospels what the fruit is to the tree that bears it. In the Gospels we see the corn of wheat falling into the ground and dying: in the Acts we see it bringing forth much fruit (Joh 12:24). There we see Christ purchasing the Church with His own blood: here we see the Church, so purchased, rising into actual existence; first among the Jews of Palestine, and next among the surrounding Gentiles, until it gains a footing in the great capital of the ancient world--sweeping majestically from Jerusalem to Rome. Nor is this book of less value as an Introduction to the Epistles which follow it, than as a Sequel to the Gospels which precede it. For without this history the Epistles of the New Testament--presupposing, as they do, the historical circumstances of the parties addressed, and deriving from these so much of their freshness, point, and force--would in no respect be what they now are, and would in a number of places be scarcely intelligible.\n\nThe genuineness, authenticity, and canonical authority of this book were never called in question within the ancient Church. It stands immediately after the Gospels, in the catalogues of the Homologoumena, or universally acknowledged books of the New Testament (see Introduction to our larger Commentary, Vol. V, pp. iv, v). It was rejected, indeed, by certain heretical sects in the second and third centuries--by the Ebionites, the Severians (see EUSEBIUS, Ecclesiastical History, 4.29), the Marcionites, and the Manicheans: but the totally uncritical character of their objections (see Introduction above referred to, pp. xiii, xiv) not only deprives them of all weight, but indirectly shows on what solid grounds the Christian Church had all along proceeded in recognizing this book.\n\nIn our day, however, its authenticity has, like that of all the leading books of the New Testament, been made the subject of keen and protracted controversy. DE WETTE, while admitting Luke to be the author of the entire work, pronounces the earlier portion of it to have been drawn up from unreliable sources (New-Testament Introduction, 2a, 2C). But the Tubingen school, with BAUR at their head, have gone much farther. As their fantastic theory of the post-Joannean date of the Gospels could not pretend even to a hearing so long as the authenticity of the Acts of the Apostles remained unshaken, they contend that the earlier portion of this work can be shown to be unworthy of credit, while the latter portion is in flat contradiction to the Epistle to the Galatians--which this school regard as unassailable--and bears internal evidence of being a designed distortion of facts for the purpose of setting up the catholic form which Paul gave to Christianity in opposition to the narrow Judaic but original form of it which Peter preached, and which after the death of the apostles was held exclusively by the sect of the Ebionites. It is painful to think that anyone should have spent so many years, and, aided by learned and acute disciples in different parts of the argument, should have expended so much learning, research, and ingenuity in attempting to build up a hypothesis regarding the origination of the leading books of the New Testament which outrages all the principles of sober criticism and legitimate evidence. As a school, this party at length broke up: its head, after living to find himself the sole defender of the theory as a whole, left this earthly scene complaining of desertion. While some of his associates have abandoned such heartless studies altogether for the more congenial pursuits of philosophy, others have modified their attacks on the historical truth of the New Testament records, retreating into positions into which it is not worth while to follow them, while others still have been gradually approximating to sound principles. The one compensation for all this mischief is the rich additions to the apologetical and critical literature of the books of the New Testament, and the earliest history of the Christian Church, which it has drawn from the pens of THIERSCH, EBRARD, and many others. Any allusions which it may be necessary for us to make to the assertions of this school will be made in connection with the passages to which they relate--in Acts, First Corinthians, and Galatians.\n\nThe manifest connection between this book and the third Gospel--of which it professes to be simply the continuation by the same author--and the striking similarity which marks the style of both productions, leave no room to doubt that the early Church was right in ascribing it with one consent to Luke. The difficulty which some fastidious critics have made about the sources of the earlier portion of the history has no solid ground. That the historian himself was an eye-witness of the earliest scenes--as HUG concludes from the circumstantiality of the narrative--is altogether improbable: but there were hundreds of eye-witnesses of some of the scenes, and enough of all the rest, to give to the historian, partly by oral, partly by written testimony, all the details which he has embodied so graphically in his history; and it will appear, we trust, from the commentary, that De Wette's complaints of confusion, contradiction, and error in this portion are without foundation. The same critic, and one or two others, would ascribe to Timothy those later portions of the book in which the historian speaks in the first person plural--\"we\"; supposing him to have taken notes of all that passed under his own eye, which Luke embodied in his history just as they stood. It is impossible here to refute this gratuitous hypothesis in detail; but the reader will find it done by EBRARD (The Gospel History, sect. 110, Clark's translation; sect. 127 of the original work, Wissenschaftliche Kritik der Evangelische Geschichte, 1850), and by DAVIDSON (Introduction to New Testament, Vol. II, pp. 9-21).\n\nThe undesigned coincidences between this History and the Apostolic Epistles have been brought out and handled, as an argument for the truth of the facts thus attested, with unrivalled felicity by PALEY in his HorÃ&brvbr PaulinÃ&brvbr, to which Mr. BIRKS has made a number of ingenious additions in his HorÃ&brvbr ApostolicÃ&brvbr. Exception has been taken to some of these by JOWETT (St. Paul's Epistles, Vol. I, pp. 108 ff.), not without a measure of reason in certain cases--for our day, at least--though even he admits that in this line of evidence the work of PALEY, taken as a whole, is unassailable.\n\nMuch has been written about the object of this history. Certainly \"the Acts of the Apostles\" are but very partially recorded. But for this title the historian is not responsible. Between the two extremes--of supposing that the work has no plan at all, and that it is constructed on an elaborate and complex plan, we shall probably be as near the truth as is necessary if we take the design to be to record the diffusion of Christianity and the rise of the Christian Church, first among the Jews of Palestine, the seat of the ancient Faith, and next among the surrounding Gentiles, with Antioch for its headquarters, until, finally, it is seen waving over imperial Rome, foretokening its universal triumph. In this view of it, there is no difficulty in accounting for the almost exclusive place which it gives to the labors of Peter in the first instance, and the all but entire disappearance from the history both of him and of the rest of the Twelve after the great apostle of the Gentiles came upon the stage--like the lesser lights on the rise of the great luminary. \n\n\n\nNext: Acts Chapter 1\n\n","order":44,"numberOfChapters":28,"sha256":"c94aad3dd7e20061c0935f668f020beecd42d660333a1ba60e42c592e5a6a94e","firstChapterNumber":1,"firstChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/1.json","firstChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":1},"lastChapterNumber":28,"lastChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/28.json","lastChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":28},"totalNumberOfVerses":775},"chapter":{"number":23,"content":[{"type":"verse","number":2,"content":["the high priest . . . commanded . . . to smite him on the mouth--a method of silencing a speaker common in the East to this day [HACKET]. But for a judge thus to treat a prisoner on his \"trial,\" for merely prefacing his defense by a protestation of his integrity, was infamous.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":3,"content":["God shall smite thee--as indeed He did; for he was killed by an assassin during the Jewish war [JOSEPHUS, Wars of the Jews, 2.17.9]. \n\nthou whited wall--that is, hypocrite (Mat 23:27). This epithet, however correctly describing the man, must not be defended as addressed to a judge, though the remonstrance which follows--\"for sittest thou,\" &c.--ought to have put him to shame.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":5,"content":["I wist not . . . that he was the high priest--All sorts of explanations of this have been given. The high priesthood was in a state of great confusion and constant change at this time (as appears from JOSEPHUS), and the apostle's long absence from Jerusalem, and perhaps the manner in which he was habited or the seat he occupied, with other circumstances to us unknown, may account for such a speech. But if he was thrown off his guard by an insult which touched him to the quick, \"what can surpass the grace with which he recovered his self-possession, and the frankness with which he acknowledged his error? If his conduct in yielding to the momentary impulse was not that of Christ Himself under a similar provocation (Joh 18:22-23), certainly the manner in which he atoned for his fault was Christ-like\" [HACKET].\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":6,"content":["when Paul perceived--from the discussion which plainly had by this time arisen between the parties. \n\nthat the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees, he cried out--raising his voice above both parties. \n\nI am a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee--The true reading seems to be, \"the son of Pharisees,\" that is, belonging to a family who from father to son had long been such. \n\nof the hope and resurrection of the dead--that is, not the vague hope of immortality, but the definite expectation of the resurrection. \n\nI am called in question--By this adroit stroke, Paul engages the whole Pharisaic section of the council in his favor; the doctrine of a resurrection being common to both, though they would totally differ in their application of it. This was, of course, quite warrantable, and the more so as it was already evident that no impartiality in trying his cause was to be looked for from such an assembly.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":8,"content":["the Sadducees say . . . there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit--(See on Luk 20:37). \n\nthe scribes . . . of the Pharisees' part . . . strove, saying, We find no evil in this man, but--as to those startling things which he brings to our ears. \n\nif a spirit or an angel hath spoken to him--referring, perhaps, to his trance in the temple, of which he had told them (Act 22:17). They put this favorable construction upon his proceedings for no other reason than that they had found him one of their own party. They care not to inquire into the truth of what he alleged, over and above their opinions, but only to explain it away as something not worth raising a noise about. (The following words, \"Let us not fight against God,\" seem not to belong to the original text, and perhaps are from Act 5:39. In this case, either the meaning is, \"If he has had some divine communication, what of that?\" or, the conclusion of the sentence may have been drowned in the hubbub, which Act 23:10 shows to have been intense).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":10,"content":["the chief captain, fearing lest Paul should have been pulled to pieces . . . commanded the soldiers to go down and take him by force, &c.--This shows that the commandant was not himself present, and further, that instead of the Sanhedrim trying the cause, the proceedings quickly consisted in the one party attempting to seize the prisoner, and the other to protect him.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":11,"content":["IN THE FORTRESS PAUL IS CHEERED BY A NIGHT VISION--AN INFAMOUS CONSPIRACY TO ASSASSINATE HIM IS PROVIDENTIALLY DEFEATED, AND HE IS DESPATCHED BY NIGHT WITH A LETTER FROM THE COMMANDANT TO FELIX AT CÆSAREA, BY WHOM ARRANGEMENTS ARE MADE FOR A HEARING OF HIS CAUSE. (Acts 23:11-35)\n\nthe night following--his heart perhaps sinking, in the solitude of his barrack ward, and thinking perhaps that all the predictions of danger at Jerusalem were now to be fulfilled in his death there. \n\nthe Lord--that is, Jesus. \n\nstood by him . . . Be of good cheer, Paul; for as thou hast testified of me in Jerusalem, so must thou . . . also at Rome--that is, \"Thy work in Jerusalem is done, faithfully and well done; but thou art not to die here; thy purpose next to 'see Rome' (Act 19:21) shall not be disappointed, and there also must thou bear witness of Me.\" As this vision was not unneeded now, so we shall find it cheering and upholding him throughout all that befell him up to his arrival there.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":12,"content":["bound themselves under a curse . . . that they would neither eat . . . fill they had killed Paul--Compare Sa2 3:35; Sa1 14:24.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":15,"content":["Now . . . ye with the council signify to the chief captain . . . as though, &c.--That these high ecclesiastics fell in readily with this infamous plot is clear. What will not unscrupulous and hypocritical religionists do under the mask of religion? The narrative bears unmistakable internal marks of truth. \n\nor ever he come near--Their plan was to assassinate him on his way down from the barracks to the council. The case was critical, but He who had pledged His word to him that he should testify for Him at Rome provided unexpected means of defeating this well-laid scheme.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":16,"content":["Paul's sister's son--(See on Act 9:30). If he was at this time residing at Jerusalem for his education, like Paul himself, he may have got at the schools those hints of the conspiracy on which he so promptly acted.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":17,"content":["Then Paul called one of the centurions--Though divinely assured of safety, he never allows this to interfere with the duty he owed to his own life and the work he had yet to do. (See on Act 27:22-25; Act 27:31).\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":19,"content":["took him by the hand--This shows that he must have been quite in his boyhood, and throws a pleasing light on the kind-hearted impartiality of this officer.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":21,"content":["and now are they ready, looking for a promise from thee--Thus, as is so often the case with God's people, not till the last moment, when the plot was all prepared, did deliverance come.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":23,"content":["two hundred soldiers--a formidable guard for such an occasion; but Roman officials felt their honor concerned in the preservation of the public peace, and the danger of an attempted rescue would seem to require it. The force at Jerusalem was large enough to spare this convoy. \n\nthe third hour of the night--nine o'clock.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":24,"content":["beasts . . . set Paul on--as relays, and to carry baggage. \n\nunto Felix, the governor--the procurator. See on Act 24:24-25.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":26,"content":["Claudius--the Roman name he would take on purchasing his citizenship. \n\nLysias--his Greek family name. \n\nthe most excellent governor--an honorary title of office.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":27,"content":["came I with an army--rather, \"with the military.\"\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":29,"content":["perceived to be accused of questions of their law, &c.--Amidst all his difficulty in getting at the charges laid against Paul, enough, no doubt, come out to satisfy him that the whole was a question of religion, and that there was no case for a civil tribunal.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":30,"content":["gave commandment to his accusers . . . to say before thee--This was not done when he wrote, but would be before the letter reached its destination.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":31,"content":["brought him . . . to Antipatris--nearly forty miles from Jerusalem, on the way to CÃ&brvbrsarea; so named by Herod in honor of his father, Antipater.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":32,"content":["On the morrow they--the infantry. \n\nleft the horsemen--themselves no longer needed as a guard. The remaining distance was about twenty-five or twenty-six miles.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":34,"content":["asked of what province he was--the letter describing him as a Roman citizen.\n\n"]},{"type":"verse","number":35,"content":["I will hear thee--The word means, \"give thee a full hearing.\" \n\nto be kept in Herod's judgment hall--\"prÃ&brvbrtorium,\" the palace built at CÃ&brvbrsarea by Herod, and now occupied by the Roman procurators; in one of the buildings attached to which Paul was ordered to be kept.\n\n\n\n\nNext: Acts Chapter 24\n\n"]}],"introduction":"PAUL'S DEFENSE BEFORE THE SAMHEDRIM DIVIDES THE RIVAL FACTIONS, FROM WHOSE VIOLENCE THE COMMANDANT HAS THE APOSTLE REMOVED INTO THE FORTRESS. (Act 23:1-10)\n\nPaul, earnestly beholding the council--with a look of conscious integrity and unfaltering courage, perhaps also recognizing some of his early fellow pupils. \n\nI have lived in all good conscience before God until this day--The word has an indirect reference to the \"polity\" or \"commonwealth of Israel,\" of which he would signify that he had been, and was to that hour, an honest and God-fearing member.\n\n"},"thisChapterLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/23.json","thisChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":23},"nextChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/24.json","nextChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":24},"previousChapterApiLink":"/api/c/jamieson-fausset-brown/ACT/22.json","previousChapterReference":{"commentaryId":"jamieson-fausset-brown","book":"ACT","chapter":22},"numberOfVerses":23}