The Forbidden Name Keeps Being Spoken

The “captain of the temple” was the sagan, the priest second in rank to the high priest, who commanded the Levite temple police. This is the first appearance of the Sadducees in the Book of Acts: the priestly aristocracy, who held that there is no resurrection (Luke 20:27; Acts 23:8).

“Grieved” is diaponeomai, to be worn down and thoroughly annoyed, the word for Paul’s exasperation with the fortune-telling slave girl (16:18). To teach “through Jesus the resurrection” was to offer one risen man as the proof of the very doctrine the Sadducees denied.

It was already evening, after the ninth hour of prayer and a long speech. The later rules of the Mishnah required capital hearings to be held by day, and a night in custody before a morning sitting fits that practice. “Hold” is teresis, custody or ward.

“Men” is andres, males, so the number may count only the men, as the feeding of the five thousand did (Luke 9:14), or it may be the running total of believers. Either way the arrest is bracketed by growth: taken in the evening, five thousand by the time the account resumes.

Rulers, elders and scribes are the three groups that made up the council, the body the Mishnah puts at seventy-one members. Jesus had named the same groups when he foretold that the Son of man would be “rejected of the elders and chief priests and scribes” (Luke 9:22).

“John” may be Jonathan son of Annas, who became high priest after Caiaphas in AD 36, and Codex Bezae in fact reads “Jonathan”. Alexander is otherwise unknown. The list reads like a family council, which is exactly what the high priesthood of the period had become.

The Mishnah describes the council sitting in a half circle so that its members could see one another, with the accused standing before them. In the Greek the question ends with an emphatic “you”: people like you. The temple rulers once put almost the same question to Jesus: “by what authority doest thou these things?” (Luke 20:2).

Jesus had told the disciples that when they were brought before rulers, “the Holy Ghost shall teach you in the same hour what ye ought to say” (Luke 12:11-12). The aorist “filled” describes a fresh filling for this hour, not only the lasting gift of Pentecost.

“Examined” is anakrino, the term for a preliminary judicial inquiry. “Good deed” is euergesia, the civic word for a public benefaction; kings and patrons liked to be called euergetai, benefactors (Luke 22:25). “Made whole” is sozo, to save, which sets up the next verses: the man was saved, and so is salvation found.

“Whom ye crucified, whom God raised” is the pattern of every apostolic speech so far (2:23-24; 3:15), and it will return in 5:30 and 10:39-40. “Whole” is hygies, sound and healthy, and the man it describes is standing in the room while Peter says it.

Psalm 118:22 says “the builders refused”; Peter makes it “you builders”. His verb is not the psalm’s but exoutheneo, to treat as nothing, the word Luke uses when Herod and his soldiers “set him at nought” (Luke 23:11). The rejection is dated to a particular morning.

“Salvation” and “saved” pick up the “made whole” of verse 9: the same Greek family covers healing and rescue. In the Roman world the title soter, saviour, was given to emperors, and an inscription from Priene hails Augustus as a saviour sent to end war; this claim would have been heard against that background.

“Ignorant” is idiotai, laymen or private persons without office, the word that later gave English “idiot”; “unlearned” is agrammatoi, without formal training in the Law. “Took knowledge” means they recognised them, perhaps from the temple courts or from the high priest’s courtyard on the night of the arrest.

“Say nothing against it” is anteipein, the verb of Jesus’ promise: “I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which all your adversaries shall not be able to gainsay nor resist” (Luke 21:15). The promise is kept in a courtroom, with a silent witness standing beside the accused.

The council deliberates with the accused sent out, yet the Book of Acts reports what was said. Someone told it afterward; the Book of Acts later mentions a great company of priests who believed (6:7) and a Pharisee on the council who spoke up (5:34). Where the report came from is an inference.

“What shall we do?” is the question the crowd asked at Pentecost (2:37), with the opposite aim: the crowd wanted to respond, the council wants to contain. “Notable miracle” is gnoston semeion, a known sign, and the rulers admit in private what they will not admit in public.

The text the King James followed doubles the verb, “threaten them with threatening”, a Hebrew way of stressing a command; the oldest manuscripts have it once. The council never pronounces the name; they say “this name”, as the high priest will again in 5:28, “ye should not teach in this name”.

“At all” is katholou, entirely, found only here in the New Testament; the English word “catholic” comes from the same phrase, kath’ holou, on the whole. The ban covers both speaking and teaching, private conversation and public instruction.

Readers have long compared Socrates before his Athenian judges: “I shall obey the god rather than you” (Plato, Apology 29d). Peter hands the verdict back to his judges with “judge ye”, making them rule on their own authority before God.

The Greek has a double negative: we are not able not to speak. Jeremiah described the same compulsion when he tried to keep silent: the word was “in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones” (Jeremiah 20:9). “Seen and heard” is the witness qualification of 1:21-22.

The rulers are hemmed in by public opinion, as they were with Jesus: “they feared the people” (Luke 20:19; 22:2). “Further threatened” is a compound, prosapeileo, adding threats to the threats already made. Meanwhile the people are glorifying God for the very thing the rulers are trying to suppress.

The Book of Acts likes to give the length of an illness: Aeneas bedridden eight years (9:33), the woman bent over eighteen years in Luke 13:11. “Miracle of healing” is literally “the sign of the healing”, the healing read as a sign pointing past itself.

“Their own company” is hoi idioi, their own people, the believing community as a distinct group. “Chief priests” is plural because the title covered former high priests and the senior men of the leading priestly families, not only the one in office.

They address God as despotes, sovereign master, the word a slave used of his owner and the word old Simeon used in the temple: “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart” (Luke 2:29). The creation formula echoes Exodus 20:11 and Psalm 146:6.

The Greek of this verse is one of the most tangled sentences in the New Testament, piling up “through the Holy Ghost”, “by the mouth of our father David” and “thy servant” in a way scribes struggled to copy. “Rage” is phryasso, to snort like a restive horse. Psalm 2 has no title in Hebrew; the believers ascribe it to David.

“His Christ” is simply “his anointed” in Psalm 2:2, christos in Greek. Psalm 2 was a coronation psalm, with the decree “Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee”, which Paul will apply to the resurrection in 13:33.

The best manuscripts read “gathered together in this city”, words the King James omits. Only Luke records Herod’s part in the trial, and that Herod and Pilate “were made friends together” that day (Luke 23:6-12). The psalm’s kings and rulers become two named men.

“Determined before” is proorizo, to mark out boundaries in advance, the word Paul uses for predestination in Romans 8:29. “Thy hand and thy counsel” pairs power and purpose, and “hand” leads straight into the request of verse 30.

The prayer echoes King Hezekiah, who spread Sennacherib’s threatening letter before the LORD and prayed “open, LORD, thine eyes, and see” (2 Kings 19:14-16). Hezekiah asked for deliverance; these ask for boldness. They call themselves douloi, slaves, of the despotes they addressed in verse 24.

“Stretching forth thine hand” is the language of the exodus, where God acted “with a stretched out arm” and by “signs, and by wonders” (Exodus 6:6; Deuteronomy 4:34). The believers ask God to do again, through the name of Jesus, what he did through Moses.

Shaking marks the presence of God at Sinai, where “the whole mount quaked greatly” (Exodus 19:18), and in Isaiah’s vision the doorposts moved at the voice (Isaiah 6:4). In 16:26 the Book of Acts will shake a prison at Philippi. The result reported is simply speech.

Aristotle, asked what a friend is, reportedly said “one soul dwelling in two bodies”, and Greek readers would hear that ideal in “one heart and of one soul”. “Multitude” is plethos, which in the Book of Acts becomes a term for the whole assembly of believers (6:2; 15:12).

“Gave witness” is apodidomi, to pay back or render what is owed, in an imperfect tense: they kept rendering their testimony like a debt. “Great grace was upon them all” can mean God’s favour or the people’s goodwill, as in 2:47; commentators divide.

The Dead Sea Scrolls describe a community whose members were required to hand their property to an overseer on joining (Community Rule 6). The Book of Acts describes something looser: owners selling as needs arose. Peter will say in 5:4 that the land remained Ananias’s own to keep.

Laying something at a person’s feet was a gesture of handing it over to his authority. The same gesture appears at Stephen’s stoning, when the witnesses lay down their clothes “at a young man’s feet, whose name was Saul” (7:58). The distribution is again an imperfect, a continuing practice.

The explanation of Barnabas as “son of consolation” has puzzled scholars, since no obvious Aramaic word for consolation matches “nabas”; many suggest bar nebu’ah, son of prophecy, since paraklesis covers prophetic encouragement. Cyprus had a large Jewish community, and he will return there twice (13:4; 15:39).

The Law gave the Levites no tribal inheritance of land (Numbers 18:20; Deuteronomy 10:9), but by this period that rule had long lapsed; Jeremiah, a priest, bought his cousin’s field at Anathoth (Jeremiah 32:7-9). Whether this field lay in Cyprus or in Judaea is not said.