Acts 24:1-9
And after five days the high priest Ananias came down with some elders… (v. 1) At first glance it may seem like the Jews took their time to come to Caesarea to make their case to the governor. However, Paul was swept away in the middle of the night and I doubt anyone followed the Roman escort all the way to Caesarea. Soon thereafter, however, some Jews in Caesarea surely heard that Paul was being held there. It would have been a two-day journey for a messenger to get from Caesarea to Jerusalem, then another day for the Jews to assemble their prosecution team, then another two-day journey back to Caesarea. So five days is a reasonable time span – and I doubt that the high priest was a young man!
Tertullus speaking: For we have found this man a plague, one who stirs up riots among all the Jews throughout the world and is a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes. (v. 5) There are a couple of items to note about this statement. Tertullus is trying to convince the Roman governor that Paul is a serious troublemaker. So first he creates the sense that Paul is something of a terrorist – leading riots throughout the world. Second, he refers to the Christians as Nazarenes. I recall that the Roman authorities in other cases had seen the Christians as simply an offshoot of the Jewish religion. Tertullus, however, is trying to claim that there is a new religion in the Roman world, one not acknowledged as legitimate by the Roman authorities.
Depending on your translation, you may see a numerical gap in verse numbering between verses 6 and 8. My Study Bible has this explanation: “Some manuscripts add ‘and we would have judged him according to our law. 7But the chief captain Lysias came and with great violence took him out of our hands, 8commanding his accusers to come before you.’ ” So verses 6b, 7, and 8a are absent in many translations. In their own translations, the ESV and NASB differ on this item. FYI.
Slava Bohu!
The charges against Paul are so twisted. First, he was “inciting riots”- but they were the ones doing the rioting, i.e., blame the victim. Second, Paul was leading an “illegal, unapproved sect” – well, it didn’t start that way, but the Jews threw them out (again, blame the victim). Finally Paul “desecrated the temple” – as Pontius Pilate would say, a religious issue, not a civil one, and untrue. You could make the argument that the Jewish leaders were desecrating the temple… In short, they were blaming Paul for their own actions, just as they did in the added verse, blaming the Roman leader in Jerusalem for the violence. How often do we in self righteousness blame the victim for their own situation?