More than forty men bind themselves by an oath not to eat until Paul is dead; warned by his nephew, Paul is secretly moved under heavy guard to the governor's residence at Caesarea to await trial.
Further context
2 min readThe next morning more than forty men form a conspiracy and bind themselves with an oath not to eat or drink until they have killed Paul.
They go to the chief priests and the elders and propose the method: ask the commander to bring Paul before the council on the pretext of wanting more accurate information about his case, and they will kill him on the way.
Then the detail that changes everything, and it is the only mention anywhere of Paul having a family. But when the son of Paul's sister heard of this plot, he went into the barracks and told Paul about it.
Nothing else is known about the sister or the nephew. That the young man had access to the barracks and to whatever circles were discussing the ambush suggests the family had standing in Jerusalem, which fits a man sent there from Tarsus to study under Gamaliel.
Paul calls a centurion and asks him to take the boy to the commander. The commander takes him by the hand, draws him aside and asks privately what he has to tell him, which is a gentler handling of a young witness than the situation required.
The response is disproportionate and immediate. The commander calls two centurions and orders them to get ready a detachment of two hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen to go to Caesarea at nine that night, with mounts for Paul.
Nearly five hundred men to escort one prisoner, moving at night, on a road through hill country. Whatever the commander thought of the case, he had already learned that he was holding a Roman citizen and could not afford to lose him.
He writes a letter to the governor Felix summarising events, and the letter contains a small piece of self-improvement: he says he rescued Paul because he had learned he was a Roman citizen, which reverses the actual order of discovery.
The infantry turn back at Antipatris and the cavalry take him the rest of the way to Caesarea. Felix reads the letter, asks what province he is from, and says he will hear the case when the accusers arrive.
Paul is kept under guard in Herod's palace, and stays there two years.
Antipatris was a town Herod had built and named after his father, roughly sixty kilometres from Jerusalem on the road to Caesarea, and the point at which the hill country gives way to the coastal plain. Once past the hills, the risk of ambush ended and the infantry could be sent back.
The letter from Claudius Lysias is preserved in full and it is the only complete Roman official document in the New Testament, written in the standard form, with the writer's name, the addressee, a greeting and a summary of the case.
Two years at Caesarea is a long silence in an active life, and what he did with them is unrecorded. Some scholars place the writing of one or more of the prison letters there rather than at Rome, and the question is unsettled.