Biblion Bible Commentary
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Why is it judged incredible that God raises the dead?
Acts 26:1-11
1 Agrippa said to Paul, “You may speak for yourself.” Then Paul stretched out his hand, and made his defense. · WEB
Paul argues that he is on trial for the hope of the twelve tribes, and puts the whole case to the king as a single question.
Then Paul stretched out his hand, and made his defense. The gesture is an orator's, made by a man in chains, and the speech that follows is the most polished in the book.
He opens by naming what makes this hearing different: Agrippa is expert in all customs and questions which are among the Jews. For the first time in five years Paul is speaking to a judge who understands the subject, and he says so.
His life is offered as evidence and its public character is stressed. All the Jews know my way of life from my youth up — in his own nation and at Jerusalem, so nothing is hidden — and they have known him from the first — if they are willing to testify. The conditional is pointed. His accusers could confirm every word and will not appear.
What they could confirm is that he lived after the strictest sect of our religion... a Pharisee. He does not present his past as an error he escaped. He presents it as a credential the prosecution cannot dispute.
Then the charge restated in his own terms, and it is the argument of the whole speech: I stand here to be judged for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers, which our twelve tribes, earnestly serving night and day, hope to attain.
This is a large claim and it is precisely made. What he is accused of holding is not a novelty and not a sect's peculiarity; it is the thing the entire nation is waiting for, and which its worship serves night and day. He is not on trial for leaving Israel's hope. He is on trial for saying it has arrived. Concerning this hope I am accused by the Jews, King Agrippa.
And then the question, thrown at the whole room in one line: Why is it judged incredible with you if God does raise the dead?
It is the sharpest sentence in the book, and its force is in the two words with you. The plural takes in Agrippa, who knows the Scriptures and professes to believe the prophets, and everyone else present. To a Jew who holds a coming resurrection, one instance of it should not be the impossible part. To a Roman who believes in nothing of the kind, the question is why God — if there is one — should be assumed unable to do the thing that would most obviously belong to him.
Having put the question, he does not argue it. He turns to his own record, and the honesty of it is the argument. I myself most certainly thought that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. He shut up many of the saints in prisons under authority from the chief priests. When they were put to death, I gave my vote against them. He punished them in the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme, and pursued them to foreign cities.
No other account is this explicit. He was not merely present at deaths; he voted for them, and he worked to make believers renounce the name. A man building a case for a resurrection begins by establishing that no one on earth had a stronger interest in disproving it.
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