There is no Jewish scriptural commandment against hypocrisy, but it is considered a serious wrong by Jesus.

Mt 7:5, Lk 6:42; Mk 7:6;, 12:15; Mt 23:13-29

Paul, Friend of the Romans 4

Before the Sanhedrin
Before the Romans
Jews Plot to Kill Paul: Before Agrippa
Paul at Rome
Paul and Seneca

Abstract

Saul had gone to Tarsus which was less than 100 miles from Antioch across the Mediterranean. He was telling stories about a new dying and rising god, like Attis with whom the gentiles were familiar, which were gladly received. On the law of Moses, Acts says James’s decrees had been delivered, so Paul, who must have had copies, merely had to produce them to show that circumcision was not mandatory if James had accepted abrogation of the Law. The decrees must have said the opposite of Luke’s pretence—the law had to be obeyed. That Paul circumcised Timothy proves James’s real decree. Paul acted in full harmony with the law, even though Luke claimed the law—and so circumcision—was not obligatory for gentiles. The career of Paul of Tarsus.

Before the Sanhedrin

Why does the tribune behave (Acts 22:30) as if he were the Procurator, forcing the Sanhedrin to convene and releasing Paul from his bonds to appear before them in his defence. Why would he risk another riot allowing Paul to appear unguarded before the Sanhedrin? Another riot breaks out.

Paul’s speech before the Sanhedrin is almost classic Greek, betraying no signs of Aramaic. It is a free composition. Christian commentators, doubtless obsessed that the New Testament is God’s word, find it inadmissable that Luke made anything up, anything, that is, that was knowingly false. This is religious gullibility. Even if Luke was the original author and was above reproach, his editors were not, and certainly his subject, Paul, was not.

At this point we find that parts must have been written after the Jewish War. Thus, Paul says that Ananias would be smitten by God (Acts 23:3) showing that the author knew that he had been killed by the zealots.

Considering that Paul is being held for causing disturbances of the peace in causing two riots and has lately been almost whipped and mistaken for a bandit, it is remarkable that he has free access to his friends and is able to command a centurion, in Acts 23:17, as if he were a servant:

Paul called one of the centurions unto him, and said, Bring this young man unto the chief captain, for he hath a certain thing to tell him.

To be able to command a centurion thus suggests he is in a favoured position. His authority could only have rested on the authority of the tribune, so the centurion must have considered him at least of the same rank. A centurion was, so to speak, the sergeant-major of the Roman army but he was more a major than a sergeant. Perhaps it is no coincidence that one of Paul’s family, a nephew, is acting as a spy against the Jews. The Acts of Paul suggest throughout that he was a high ranking double agent.

Paul is given a huge escort, equal to a full cohort of men, 400 infantry and 70 cavalry. Christian commentators pretend that this is not unusual in the situation of insurrection and riots, but that is manifestly silly. Paul was not, on the face of it, a VIP, and in such unstable circumstances it could equally be argued that it was unlikely that the governor had forces to spare to escort an unknown Romanized Jew to safety. The explanation is that Paul must have been a VIP!

The tribune’s letter (Acts 23:26-30) has a ring of truth in that it tries to get kudos for the author as the saviour of an important spy, though the transcription given in Acts and probably the original letter for that matter could hardly be explicit about the reason why Paul was so valuable. It finds Paul innocent of any charges as usual. The letter was for the procurator Felix, and one might wonder how Luke knew what was in it. Presumably Paul, who turned out to be great friends with the Roman governor, had read it and told Luke. It seems Paul was the only channel for Luke to discover the contents of the letter and it proves that he was hand-in-glove with the top-most colonial officials of that part of the Empire.

Before the Romans

Paul, in Acts 24:23, is granted favourable status by Felix and is held for two years, supposedly in captivity, but probably in protective custody. Acts tries to explain the favourable treatment of Paul by showing Felix’s wife, a Jew, as being influential, but also that the governor hoped for a bribe. This might seem surprising since Romans are usually shown in a good light, but bribes were part of Roman life, just as they are today in the east, and indeed, just as they increasingly are here, and would not have been a surprise.

Luke will have mentioned the bribe because puzzled critics had suggested bribery was the reason for Paul’s good fortune. Luke implies that Paul’s two years of captivity preclude the possibility. Felix must have had reason to think that Paul had money if he really hoped for a bribe yet the only money Paul could have had was the money collected for the Ebionim. To relieve the sense of collusion, Paul is delivered by Felix into the hands of Festus in chains. It would have been unlikely even if Paul had been a real prisoner.

There is an interesting proof of the favour with which Paul was treated. In the speech by the rhetor, the Roman advocate for the Jews, in Acts 24:6-7, some authorities add, after “we seized him:”

…and we would have judged him according to our law but the chief captain, Lysias, came and, with great violence, took him out of our hands, commanding his accusers to come before you.

Though this does not appear in manuscripts considered to be the best, it is unlikely to be an invention. Romans are shown using seemingly unwarranted violence against Jews going about their own business. It is not favourable to the Romans, as Luke usually is, but is just what is to be expected of the Roman colonial administration, and it too strongly suggests that the Romans had a vested interest in Paul’s welfare, even to the point of risking a flashpoint incident in an unstable period. In seven more years, the Jewish war broke out in earnest, though it had effectively already started.

Christian commentators reject the passage, at best including it as a footnote. They argue that the advocate would not have criticised the captain in front of the procurator. Felix was, like most of the Procurators, a hard man, the flattery at the start of the rhetor’s speech being simply a formality. He kept the cap on the uprising for several years with severe measures, but such tactics simply aggravate the source of the dissent and build up steam.

Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that in that climate the rhetor’s remarks would have been construed as critical. Brutal suppression was the norm. The rhetor could freely raise the matter precisely because it was what Felix had ordered—suppress dissent. The Jews had asked the rhetor to make their point which was that there was no dissent in this instance. They were merely doing what they were allowed to do by the Romans—protect their own customs. In Acts, Paul was accused of polluting the temple by taking gentiles into the proscribed courts, a religious crime punishable by death, as the Romans had recognized—even if the perpetrator was a Roman citizen! The violent attack was therefore unjust in this case and the explanation of it was that Paul’s friends had alerted the tribune.

The advocate for the Jews describes Paul as a “ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes, who moreover…” implying that being a Nazarene should have been sufficient of a crime for the Procurator. If Jesus was falsely betrayed by the Jews and falsely murdered by the Romans, why are his followers thirty years later still considered criminals? The crime was serious, which Christians cannot admit and it was a crime which was still relevant in the atmosphere of unrest which still persisted. Jesus was a rebel.

Paul’s defence is that of an Essene. He explains the meaning of the Nazarene sect, the followers of “the Way”, but naturally says nothing about their revolutionary intentions. Followers of “the Way” serve God believing in the law and the prophets, and the resurrection of the just and the unjust. Felix says he has accurate knowledge about “the Way” but defers judgement until Lysias arrives. Apparently he never does, so Paul is still under arrest in the palace two years later. What Felix means when he says he has accurate knowledge about “the Way” is uncertain but it probably means the knowledge which the Roman master spy, Paul, has already given him.

Jews Plot to Kill Paul and he appears before Agrippa

It defies all credibility to believe that the Jewish Sanhedrin should have been plotting (Acts 25:3) to murder a Roman, even, or especially, in a period of national turmoil. Many of the Sanhedrin were Roman collaborators, and even those who were not were not so stupid that they thought the Romans, who as the suppressed sentence discussed above in Acts shows were brutal, would not savage the land. Soon the war was to break out in earnest, but the first victims were the collaborators themselves. We are expected to believe that the Jewish leaders would precipitate the war by assassinating a man who was not only a Roman but was favoured by the Roman elite, and must by now have been known to all to have been a provocateur.

If anyone plotted to kill Paul, it could not have been the members of the Jewish Parliament but the members of the Jerusalem church, not only pious Jews but jealous for the law, as Acts has told us. No doubt the Sanhedrin had been incensed that the Roman governor had effectively flouted the law by saving Paul from trial when he had been accused of polluting the temple, but to imagine they would take the law into their own hands is asking too much.

Now, Paul is depicted as appearing before Agrippa, an unlikely scenario except as a charade because Paul had already appealed to Caesar and Festus had agreed to it (Acts 25:11-12). The only point of it is to fulfil prophecy—that Christians would have to appear before rulers and kings. In fact, Caesar was a king and it is strange perhaps that the trial before Caesar is not the end of the story.

Christians believe that Paul was martyred by Nero because it became de rigeur for the apostles to be martyred. But if the martyrdom was the result of the trial then Paul, who was never found guilty of any crime by any Roman, would have had his record spoiled and Roman administrators who always are shown as kind, contrary to the facts, would have been shown as the monsters they often were. That might be so, but Nero was quickly recognized as a monster and the Christian martyrdom of the apostle to the gentiles under a man who came to be seen as the anti-Christ would have ended the story nicely.

The more likely explanation is that Paul never came to trial because the appeal to Caesar was a ploy to get Paul back to Rome without antagonising the Jews even more. An appeal to Caesar was the privilege of a Roman citizen, but involved high costs and expenses. Only a rich man could afford it, so the appeal of Paul implies either that he was rich or the appeal was an administrative cover. If the appeal was genuine then Paul was a rich man, otherwise he was under state protection. As Acts says, Festus or Felix could have acquitted Paul, but the Jews would have been in a real revolt that the colonial administration had flouted its own law relating to respect for the temple. By claiming Paul had referred the case to Caesar he could be shipped off with everyone believing he still had to be tried. In fact, he was pensioned off to Spain, according to Christian tradition, at the opposite end of the world from his main exploits.

So, the appearance before Agrippa was quite specious. Paul defends himself before a king and Luke has the chance to give the third version of the conversion of his hero. In Acts 26:2 and 6, we are given the impression of a court hearing but, if it ever happened at all, it was merely an evening’s entertainment for the potentate with Paul acting as Munchausen again.

Paul is economical with the truth immediately, saying he had always lived in Judaea and Jerusalem when Luke himself tells us three times that he was born in Tarsus. Apparently he came to Palestine as a young man, or so the Ebionites say, probably about the time of the activity of Jesus. He says he was always a Pharisee. It might seem churlish to question this but much in his life is better explained if he had been trained as an Essene. He uses characteristically Essene words, spent a mysterious three years in Arabia which can best be accounted for if he had been an Essene novice in that time and he ends up a Christian having many similar views.

Thus, in this speech he uses the characteristic word “saints” meaning those who were perfectly holy. In Acts 26:18, we get vivid Essene phraseology, “open their eyes”, “darkness to light”, to receive a remission of sins and an inheritance, meaning originally the kingdom of God—the land of Israel. In Acts 26:20, the message is that of John the Baptist—to repent—and that of James—to do works worthy of repentance. In Acts 26:23, he states that Jesus is the first of the resurrection of the dead, the first to be resurrected in the general resurrection that will introduce the dead righteous into the kingdom of God. Christians claim this is a Pauline teaching because it appears in Colossians 1:18 but since it is surely the reason why the disappearance of the body of Jesus impressed his original followers, it precedes Paul.

The Nazarenes could have been a loose sect under the wing of the Essenes of those who were zealous for the law and had undergone baptism in readiness for the kingdom to come. Possibly they were allowed to follow their individual sectarian preferences while united under the sacraments of baptism and repentance.

In Acts 26:10, Paul pretends, or Luke does, that Paul sat on the Great Sanhedrin, “I cast my vote against him”. It seems quite incredible that a junior Pharisee should have had a seat on the Great Council of 70 of the Jewish great and good. Paul is both boasting and trying to impress with the magnitude of his own conversion. Nevertheless, it is possible that Paul had a vote on the Sanhedrin as a Sadducee. The evidence suggests he had a role as a secret policeman and might have been head of the Temple Guard, conceivably giving him a vote even as quite a young man in those turbulent times. In Acts 26:20, Paul braggs that he has preached all over Judaea, but there is no other evidence that he did, and it seems unlikely that the appointed apostles would have allowed it. They sent him abroad to be shot of him.

The apparent accusation of madness by Festus (Acts 26:24) is obviously the playful banter of people who knew each other well. Paul suggests that Agrippa is aware of hidden things (Acts 26:26), a crucial expression of the Essenes and one which translates into “Nazarene”. Then he adds (Acts 26:27-28): “I know thou believest”, apparently referring to the law and the prophets but an expression always used of Christians, those who believe in Jesus. Paul seems to think Agrippa is a Christian and allows Agrippa subtly to admit it, which he might do, saying literally: “you take a very short time to make me a Christian”. Elsewhere Herodians did adopt Christianity and in Acts 24:24 is a clear suggestion that Drusilla did. She was a member of the Herodian family being the daughter of Herod Agrippa I and the sister of Agrippa and Bernice.

Paul at Rome

On his journey to Rome, ostensibly to be tried by Caesar, Paul’s ship meets a raging storm at sea. Christians always say the storm is so vividly described it must be a real experience. There seems little doubt of this. Whoever wrote of the experience had surely had the experience, but was it this one? It does not really matter, but the reason why it is put here might not be because it actually happened at this time but because survival of a shipwreck in Roman superstition was considered a sign from the gods of innocence. So, a shipwreck there might have been, but Luke puts it precisely here as a way of asserting Paul’s innocence. The implication is now lost but it would have been clear when the book was written.

In the account, we get a revealing detail. Paul was to be escorted (Acts 27:1) by a centurion of the “Augustan Band”. Now in the first century, a Roman military unit called the Cohors Augusta I was in Syria. This might have been the centurion’s unit, but the “Augustan Band” could also mean the “Frumentarii”, the special troops of the emperor, a sort of SIS, all of whom had the rank of centurion. Of the functions they served, one was as secret police and another was spying!

The soldier seems to be of inferior rank to Paul, taking orders from him in the storm, and otherwise seems to be acting more as a minder than as a warder. This does not prove that Paul was a Roman spy but it tops the strange set of circumstances that point in that direction. Paul has a charmed life, he causes troubles among Jews everywhere and is always saved by Romans, he has a secret Roman citizenship, he is always treated respectfully by senior Roman officials as if he is a VIP, he is allowed to opt for a trial before Caesar in Rome instead of being tried as he should have been by the Sanhedrin for a religious crime, he is escorted by a centurion of the Roman MI6, probably his own unit!

On the journey back, Paul is effectively a free man, able to visit his friends (Acts 27:3). Later he has enough authority to argue with the captain of the vessel (Acts 27:9-10). Paul seems to take command in the midst of the storm and advises the centurion (Acts 27:31), and the centurion takes pains to save Paul’s life (Acts 27:43).

In Acts 28:14, Paul is free to do as he likes. In Acts 28:16, he is not jailed but is “guarded ”by a soldier. Again, the guard is not a warder but a protector. The Western Text adds that the prisoners were handed to the Stratopedarch, the Princeps Peregrinorum, head of the Frumentarii. It seems Paul has to be de-briefed by the equivalent of M.

Paul finishes up in Rome teaching as a free man.

The Jews of Rome (Acts 28:22) recognize the sect of Christians as unpopular everywhere yet wanted to know from Paul all about it. This has to be baloney because they could have learnt all they wanted from the Roman Christians many of whom had, apparently, walked forty miles to meet Paul. The meaning is either that the sect of Christians, the Nazarenes, was unpopular everywhere among the Romans, because it was still known as a revolutionary group, or that the faithful Jewish Christians of the Jerusalem Church in Rome considered the Hellenized branch favoured by Paul as unpopular.

The Jerusalem Church seems to have sent people after Paul constantly to keep an eye on him and to keep his activities within bounds. They failed. But one theory of Christian scholars to explain how Peter came to be in Rome as well as Paul, and some anomalies in the records of the first bishops of Rome, was that there were two autonomous churches in Rome. A Jewish Christian Church recognized the seniority of the Jerusalem Church and Paul’s Church of Hellenized Jews and gentiles that denied the authority of Jerusalem.

On this hypothesis, Peter followed Paul to Rome to preach that Christianity remained Jewish, in contradiction to Paul. If Paul was an agent provocateur, in Rome he was under the protection of the Praetorian Guard. The outbreak of the Jewish War was a failure of Paul’s strategy of syncretism to weaken Jewish expectations, but he must by then have been pensioned off. A mystery man called Saul was brought in to help negotiate with the Jews, and this man conceivably was Paul, brought out of retirement because of his great knowledge of Jewish matters, but it is a moot point. If, as Christians maintain, he was beheaded, it must have been because he was mistrusted as a failure, and was treated by the Romans as a double agent.

Acts ends interestingly with the very quotation from Isaiah 6:9-10 that justified the use of code by the Essenes and Nazarenes. It is taken to refer to those who will not hear, the infidels and the unbelieving Jews of God’s chosen people but, to those who know a little about the Essenes, it almost taunts the reader, saying:

You don’t understand, either.

Paul and Seneca

Roman policy was to unite the peoples of the empire under a common culture, and S Paul was active in this policy:

There is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon him.
Romans 10:12

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Galatians 3:28

Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ is all, and in all.
Colossians 3:11

Paul, while calling himself a Jew by birth and a Christian by faith, did not hesitate to call himself a Roman whenever he had dealings with the authorities.

Each nation had its own favoured gods and different people favoured different sects and cults, yet to be a Roman was to transcend all of this. Roman syncretism wanted to get rid of these divisions and the worst culprits were the Jews whose faith in the One True God was exclusively theirs and they were identified by their distinguishing mark of circumcision.

In Rome, Stoicism was the philosophy of the ruling classes, whose tradition values of doing the right thing it suited. The Christians of the second century had a high opinion of the Stoics. Justin spoke of Musonius Rufus as being unwittingly a Christian martyr, and Tertullian considered Seneca as “often ours”. Justin pointed out in his Apologia that Stoicism and Christianity agree closely on moral questions. Romans 13 emphasises the similarity between the Stoic and the Christian attitude to the state and all it stood for.

There is a fourth century tradition that Paul and Seneca were friends and correspondents. Seneca and Paul both used the unusual Hebraic word “caro” meaning “flesh”. Paul appeared before Seneca’s brother Gallio, Proconsul of Achaia in 51 AD, in Corinth and Gallio dismissed the case against him. Seneca was also a friend of Burrus, the Praetorian Prefect during Paul’s imprisonment who also treated Paul leniently. Paul was allowed to preach the gospel while still in prison. Now Seneca and Burrus were not just common citizens of Rome, that Paul might have met casually. They were or became the rulers of Rome when Nero was a boy. Nero’s mother Agrippina, employed Seneca as Nero’s tutor and for several years he effectively ruled the empire alongside Burrus. If Paul was pardoned, as seems probable, Burrus arranged it. Seneca could have met Paul through either of these two common agents. Indeed, the friendship could have preceded the known history of Paul.

It is hard to see Paul as anything other than a well connected Roman agent provocateur—what in Persian times would have been called a prophet—a propagandist for the imperialists.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.