Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Acts · About this commentary
A centurion who prayed
Acts 10:1-8
1 Now there was a certain man in Caesarea, Cornelius by name, a centurion of what was called the Italian Regiment, · WEB
The book pauses to describe a Roman officer's piety in detail before anything happens to him, because everything that follows turns on God having noticed it.
The chapter opens by slowing down. A new name, a new city, and four clauses of description before a single event — which is unusual in a book that normally moves at speed, and it signals that the man matters as much as what happens to him.
He is a centurion of the Italian Regiment at Caesarea . That is the Roman provincial capital, the seat of the governor, garrison town of an occupying army, and about as far from the temple in every sense as a place in Judea could be. A centurion commanded roughly eighty men and was the backbone of the army — a career soldier, not an aristocrat.
Then four things about his religion, and each is precise. He is devout. He feared God with all his house, which makes him a God-fearer in the recognized sense: a Gentile who worshiped the God of Israel, attended the synagogue, and had not become a Jew. The household is included, so this is not a private eccentricity. He gave gifts for the needy generously to the people — to the Jewish people, from an officer of the occupying force. And he always prayed to God.
What he is not is equally important. He is not circumcised, and he has not taken on the law. By the standards of the men Peter will have to answer in Jerusalem, this is a Gentile, and admitting him is the question that will occupy the next six chapters.
The vision comes at about the ninth hour — three in the afternoon, the hour of the evening sacrifice and of Jewish prayer, which is when this Roman happens to be praying. He sees the angel clearly, and the writer says so, because the whole account will depend on the report being reliable.
The message is startling in what it says about the previous years. Your prayers and your gifts to the needy have gone up for a memorial before God. That is temple language — the word used of an offering's portion burned so that its smoke rises. The prayers and charity of an uncircumcised soldier are described as a sacrifice God has accepted. Heaven had been receiving them all along, and nobody on earth had known it.
But the message does not stop there, and the omission is as important as the statement. The angel does not tell him he is saved, does not preach to him, and does not explain anything. It gives him an address: send to Joppa for Simon called Peter, who is staying with a tanner by the sea. A man whose devotion God has already accepted still needs to hear something he has not heard, and it must come from a human being — which is why the angel's whole function in this chapter is to arrange a meeting.
Cornelius obeys at once and sends three men, one of them a devout soldier, which suggests the piety of the household had spread into the barracks. He explains everything to them, which is an officer treating servants as people who need to understand the errand rather than merely perform it.
settled What this mark means