NOTES ON THE INTERNATIONAL LESSON.
Paul’s Escape from Jerusalem.
The dawn of the next day sufficed to prove that his manœuvre in the Sanhedrim had only won a temporary success at the cost of a deeper exasperation. So unquenchable was the fury against him, and so inflamed was the feeling of disappointment that Lysias should have snatched him away from their revenge, that in the morning no less than forty Jews bound themselves with a terrible cherem not to eat or drink till they had killed him. The Jews, like some Christians in the worst days of Christendom, believed in the divine right of assassination as the means of getting rid of a tyrant or an apostate. Their penal blindness had deceived them into the sanctification of religious murder. How dark a picture does it present to us of the state of Jewish thought at this period that, just as Judas had bargained with the chief priests for the blood-money of his Lord, so these forty sicarii went, not only without a blush, but with an evident sense of merit, to the hostile section of the Sanhedrim, to suggest to them the concoction of a lie for the facilitation of a murder. “We are bound under a curse not to touch food till we slay Paul. Do you, then, and the Sanhedrim, give notice to the commandant to bring him down to you, under pretext of a more accurate inquiry into his case. We, before he gets near you, are prepared to slay him.” So far from rejecting the suggestion with execration, as many a heathen would have done, these degenerate Jews and worldly priests agreed to it with avidity. But a secret known to forty conspirators, and requiring the complicity of an indefinite number more, is no secret at all. There were sure to be dark hints, ominous gestures, words of ill-concealed triumph, and, indeed, so unanimous among the orthodox Jews, and even, we fear, among some nominal Jewish Christians, was the detestation of the man who taught “apostasy from Moses,” that in most circles there was no need for any pretence of concealment. When St. Peter had been in prison, and in peril of execution, the Christian community of Jerusalem had been in a ferment of alarm and sorrow, and prayer had been made day and night without ceasing to God for him; but St. Peter, and especially the St. Peter of that early period, was regarded with feelings very different from those with which the Judaic believers looked on the bold genius whose dangerous independence treated Mosaism and its essential covenant as a thing of the past for converted Gentiles. We hear of no prayer from any one of the elders or the “many myriads” on behalf of St. Paul. He owed to a relative, and not to the church, the watchful sympathy which alone rescued him from murder. He had a married sister living in Jerusalem, who, whether she agreed or not with the views of her brother—and the fact that neither she nor her family are elsewhere mentioned, and that St. Paul never seems to have put up at her house, makes it at least very doubtful—had yet enough natural affection to try to defeat a plot for his assassination. Most gladly would we have known something further about the details. All that we are told is, that the son of this lady, apparently a mere boy, on hearing of the intended ambuscade, went at once to the barracks of Fort103Antonia, and gaining ready access to his uncle, who, as an untried Roman citizen, was only kept in custodia militaris, revealed to him the plot. The apostle acted with his usual good sense and promptitude. Sending for one of the ten centurions of the garrison, he said to him, “Lead this youth to the commandant, for he has something to tell him.” There is a touch of very natural kindness in the way in which the Roman officer received the Jewish boy. Lysias took him by the hand, and, walking with him to a place where they were out of earshot, began to ask him what his message was. The youth told him. Lysias saw the importance of the secret, and instantly formed his plans. He told the youth not to mention to any one that he had given him information of the conspiracy, and, summoning two centurions, ordered them to equip two hundred legionaries, seventy cavalry soldiers, two hundred lancers, with two spare horses, to be ready to escort Paul safely to Cæsarea that very evening at nine o’clock. He was extremely glad to get rid of a prisoner who created such excitement, and who was the object of an animosity so keen that it might at any moment lead to a riot. There was now sufficient pretext to send Paul away swiftly and secretly, and so get rid of an embarrassing responsibility. At nine that evening, when it was dark, and when the streets would be deserted, the large escort of four hundred and seventy soldiers—an escort the necessity of which shows the dangerous condition of the country, and the extent of Lysias’s alarm—stood ready at the gate of the barracks. Paul was mounted on one of the horses provided for him, and the escort rode rapidly through the disturbed country, in the vicinity of Jerusalem, with a sharp lookout against any ambuscade. After that, being too numerous and well-armed to have any dread of mere brigands, they went at their ease along a Roman road, the thirty-five miles to Antipatris. Here they rested for the remainder of the night. Next day the four hundred legionaries and lancers marched back to Jerusalem, while the mounted soldiers rode forward on the remaining twenty-five miles to Cæsarea. St. Paul thus entered Cæsarea with a pomp of attendance very unlike the humble guise in which he had left it, amid the little caravan of his fellow-Christians. They entered the town in broad daylight, and so large a body passing through the streets must have attracted many curious eyes. How must Philip and the other Christians of Cæsarea have been startled to recognize the rapid fulfilment of their forebodings as they saw the great teacher, from whom they had parted with so many tears, ride through the streets, with his right hand chained to the arm of a horseman, amid a throng of soldiers from the garrison of Antonia! That ride, in the midst of his Roman body-guard, was destined to be his last experience of air and exercise, till—after two years of imprisonment—his voyage to Rome began.—Farrar’s Life of Paul.