Biblion Bible Commentary
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For the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain
Acts 28:17-22
17 After three days Paul called together those who were the leaders of the Jews. When they had come together, he said to them, “I, brothers, though I had done nothing against the people or the customs of our fathers, still was delivered prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans, · WEB
Three days after arriving, Paul calls the Jewish leaders and insists he has nothing against his nation — and they say nobody has written to them about him.
After three days Paul called together those who were the leaders of the Jews. Three days, in a city he has wanted to see for years, as a prisoner who has just crossed the Mediterranean — and the first thing he does is the thing he has done in every city since Damascus.
He cannot go to the synagogue, so he convenes the synagogue's leaders in his lodging. The method has survived the chain.
His statement to them is careful and defensive in a particular direction. I had done nothing against the people or the customs of our fathers — the two charges from the temple riot, denied together. He was handed over from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans, and the Romans, on examination, desired to set me free, because there was no cause of death in me. Every hearing in the last six chapters is compressed into that clause, and it is accurate.
The explanation of the appeal is the delicate part, and he handles it with care: I was constrained to appeal to Caesar, not that I had anything about which to accuse my nation. He wants it understood that his appeal was defensive rather than an action against his own people. A man in his position could easily have been reported in Rome as a Jew who had gone to the emperor against the Jewish authorities, and he closes that off in the first conversation.
Then the sentence he has been building to, and it is the summary of his whole defense across four hearings: because of the hope of Israel I am bound with this chain.
He lifts the chain, or as good as. The thing that has him in custody is not a crime, not a sect, and not a quarrel with his nation. It is the hope of Israel — the resurrection, the promise to the fathers — and he claims to be in irons for the very thing the men in front of him are waiting for.
Their reply is unexpected and is one of the most interesting details in the chapter. We neither received letters from Judea concerning you, nor did any of the brothers come here and report or speak any evil of you.
No dispatch, no delegation, no campaign. Whatever energy the Jerusalem leadership had spent on this case for two years, none of it had been directed at Rome. The plainest reading is that they knew the case was lost once the appeal was made, and had let it go.
What the Roman leaders do want is a hearing: we desire to hear from you what you think. And their reason is a description of the church from the outside that is worth setting beside the town clerk's and Festus': as concerning this sect, it is known to us that everywhere it is spoken against.
They know of the movement and they know its reputation, and both are stated without hostility. They are asking a man they have never met to explain something they have only heard denounced — which is exactly the opening Paul has been given in city after city, and the last one he gets in this book.
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