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country, and had only recently rid the land of a false Messiah, an Egyptian. His real
character, however, cannot be gathered from these opening compliments. Tacitus wrote
of him:
"In the practice of all kinds of lust and cruelty he exercised the power of a king with
the tempter of a slave" (Hist. 5: 9).
"We may trace the libidinem in his persuading Drusilla to leave her husband and to
live with him; the saevitiam, in his procuring the assassination of the high priest
Jonathan, who had given him good but distasteful advice; the servile ingenium in that `he
trembled' under castigation, but was not corrected" (W. G. Humphry).
After the opening panegyric Tertullus passes on to the accusation. This he divides up
under three heads:
(1)
The accused was a public pest, a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout
the Empire.
(2)
He was a ringleader of a sect of the Nazarenes.
(3)
He had attempted to profane the Temple.
This threefold accusation implied that Paul had offended against both Roman and
Jewish law. The first offence amounted to majestas, or treason against the Emperor,
while the third in itself was punishable by death.
The word for "a pestilent fellow" is loimos, "a plague". What a name to give this
bearer of life and light to a stricken and dying world! The word for "sedition" is stasis,
which occurs in connection with the charge laid against Barabbas (Mark 15: 7), and is
also used for the "uproar" in Ephesus (Acts 19: 40). Tertullus was careful not to refer to
Paul as a leader of the "Christians", for the title "Christ", being equivalent of "the
Messiah", might have involved the Jews themselves.
Considerable differences of opinion exist among textual critics as to whether the
second half of verse 7 and the first half of verse 8 should be included in the text or not.
In the A.V. the passage reads:
"Whom we took, and would have judged according to our law, but the chief captain
Lysias came upon us, and with great violence took him away out of our hands,
commanding his accusers to come unto thee: by examining of whom thyself mayest take
knowledge of all these things, whereof we accuse him" (Acts 24: 6-8).
If we omit the suspected passage, then the words "of whom" refer to Paul. If, on the
other hand, the A.V. be retained, they would refer to Lysias. Felix certainly adjourned
the case, saying: "When Lysias the chief captain shall come down, I will know the
uttermost of your matter" (verse 22), but whether or not this was an act of evasion it is
impossible to say. Certainly Lysias never came, and Felix never heard the conclusion of
the trial. In any case no doctrinal point is affected by the uncertainty in verses 7 and 8,
and we therefore propose to follow the A.V.
Before, however, we consider Paul's defence before Felix, we must get a general view
of the whole of the section.