This may well be the most random verse that my random verse generator has spit out yet!
“He wrote a letter in the following manner:”
—Acts 23:25
The apostle Paul was in trouble. He had been arrested in Jerusalem by the Roman commander (technically, the chiliarch), Claudius Lysias, essentially for disturbing the peace, and had been dragged off to “the barracks,” most likely the Fortress Antonia. Falling back on the customary practice of the day in the provinces of the Roman Empire, Lysias had ordered his soldiers to question their prisoner under scourging “so that he might know why [the Jews] had shouted so against him” (Acts 22:24). As the company’s centurion was about to begin the violent examination, Paul stopped him in his tracks with a simple question: “Is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman, and uncondemned?” (Acts 22:25).
Obviously, the answer was an emphatic, “No!” Roman law forbade the practice of flogging a Roman citizen without his having been heard or formally sentenced. Paul, who had been born a citizen, had a more solid claim to citizenship than Lysias himself, who had bought his citizenship “with a large sum.” Having been caught in an illegality that could have had major—perhaps even fatal—consequences, the commander, terribly afraid for himself and his career, knew he had to handle the situation with finesse to extricate himself and Paul, a fellow Roman, from this politically delicate situation.
His solution was to bring Paul before the Sanhedrin to find out what the Jews had against him. Yet, as soon as the apostle began to speak, the high priest, Ananias, commanded that Paul be punched in the mouth (Acts 23:2)! It was not long before the hearing had disintegrated into an uproar over the beliefs of the various Jewish factions (an argument Paul purposely started; see verse 6), so the Roman commander extricated the apostle from the chamber lest he “be pulled to pieces” in the fracas (verse 10).
Within a few days, the intrigue deepened. Forty Jews formed a conspiracy, vowing not to eat or drink until Paul lay dead at their feet! It “just so happened” that Paul’s nephew overheard these men conversing with the chief priests and elders, and hurried to warn his uncle of their murderous plans. Paul sent him to Lysias to repeat his tale of the plans to assassinate him as he was returned to the council chamber. With this new information, the commander quickly had to formulate a plan before his prisoner was killed on his watch.
This is where our brief verse comes into the story. Lysias penned a letter to the procurator of the province, Marcus Antonius Felix, who governed from Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast, informing him of the details of Paul’s situation. Along with Paul and the letter, the commander sent “two hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen, and two hundred spearmen” (Acts 23:23)—470 men!—in the middle of the night to Antipatris and then on to Caesarea. His plan was not just to kick the matter up to his superior, but also to remove the apostle from the hotbed of intrigue that Jerusalem was at the time and to force the Jews to travel out of their comfort zone and away from their base of support, the religious populace of the Holy City.
This was the beginning of a long episode in the apostle Paul’s life, one that ended, traditional history teaches, with an acquittal from the Roman Emperor Nero himself. Of this Paul writes in II Timothy 4:17, “I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion.”
