NOTES ON THE INTERNATIONAL LESSON.
ONLY a day or two had elapsed after Paul's appeal, when Agrippa II., the last of the Herods, and his sister Bernice came down to Cesarea to pay their respects to the new procurator. It was a compliment which they could never safely omit, and we find that they paid similar visits to each procurator in succession. The regal power of Agrippa, such as it was, depended on no popular support, but simply and solely on the will of the emperor. As a breath had made him first king of Chalcis (A. D. 48), then of the tetrarchy of Philip (A. D. 52), and finally of various other cities (A. D. 55), so on any day a breath might unmake him. During the visit of Agrippa and Bernice to Festus, he took the opportunity of referring to the perplexing case of the prisoner Paul. He told Agrippa of the fury which seemed to inspire the whole Jewish people at the mention of his name, and of the futile results of the trial just concluded. However much the Jews might try to misrepresent the real questions at issue, it was clear that they turned on Mosaic technicalities, and “on one Jesus who was dead, whom Paul alleged to be alive”—matters about which Festus had no jurisdiction, and could not be supposed to know anything. The prisoner, however, had refused to be tried again by the Sanhedrim, and had appealed to the decision of the Augustus. “I should have liked myself also to hear this person,” said Agrippa. Festus eagerly closed with the wish, and fixed the next day for the gratification of the king's fancy. It was not, as is commonly represented, a new trial. That would have been, on all grounds, impossible. Agrippa was without judicial functions, and the authority of the procurator had been cut short by the appeal. It was more of the nature of a private or drawing-room audience—a sort of show occasion designed for the amusement of these princely guests, and the idle aristocracy of Cesarea, both Jewish and Gentile. Festus ordered the auditorium to be prepared for the occasion, and invited all the chief officers of the army, and the principal inhabitants of the town. We are expressly told that Agrippa and Bernice went in state to the pretorium, she, doubtless, blazing with all her jewels, and he in his purple robes, and both with the golden circlets of royalty around their foreheads, and attended by a suite of followers in the most gorgeous apparel of Eastern pomp. Did Agrippa think of his great-grandfather Herod, and the massacre of the innocents? of his great-uncle Antipas, and the murder of John the Baptist? of his father Agrippa I., and the execution of James the Elder? Did he recall the fact that they had each died or been disgraced soon after, or in direct consequence of, those inflictions of martyrdom? Did he realize how closely, but unwittingly, the faith in that “one Jesus” had been linked with the destinies of his house? Did the pomp of to-day remind him of the pomp sixteen years earlier, when his much more powerful father had stood in the theater, with the sunlight blazing on the tissued silver of his robe, and the people shouting that he was a god? Did none of the dark memories of the place overshadow him as he entered that former palace of his race? It is very unlikely. Extreme vanity, gratified self-importance, far more probably absorbed the mind of this titular king, as, in all the pomp of phantom sovereignty, he swept along the large, open hall, seated himself with his beautiful sister by the procurator's side, and glanced with cold curiosity on the poor, worn, shackled prisoner—pale with sickness and long imprisonment—who was led in at his command. Festus opened the proceedings in a short, complimentary speech, in which he found an excuse for the gathering, by saying that on the one hand the Jews were extremely infuriated against this man, and that on the other he was entirely innocent, so far as he could see, of any capital crime. Since, however, he was a Roman citizen, and had appealed to Cæsar, it was necessary to send to “the lord” some minute of the case by way of elogium, and he was completely perplexed as to what he ought to say. He was, therefore, glad of the opportunity to bring the prisoner before this distinguished assembly, that they, and especially King Agrippa, might hear what he had to say for himself, and so, by forming some sort of preliminary judgment, relieve Festus from the ridiculous position of sending a prisoner without being able to state any definite crime with which he had been charged. As no accusers were present, and this was not in any respect a judicial assembly, Agrippa, as the person for whom the whole scene was got up, told Paul that he was allowed to speak about himself. There is not a word of his address which does not prove how completely he was at his ease. The scarlet sagum of the procurator, the fasces of the lictors, the swords of the legionaries, the gleaming armor of the Chiliarchs, did not for one moment daunt him—they were a terror, not to good works, but to the evil; and he felt that his was a service which was above all sway. Stretching out his hand in the manner familiar to the orators whom he had often heard in Tarsus or in Antioch, he began by the sincere remark that he was particularly happy to make his defense before King Agrippa, whose anxiety to conform to the law, both written and oral, was well known. He begged, therefore, for a patient audience, and narrated once more the familiar story of his conversion from the standpoint135of a rigid and bigoted Pharisee to a belief that the Messianic hopes of his nation had now been actually fulfilled in that Jesus of Nazareth, whose followers he had at first furiously persecuted, but who had won him, by a personal revelation of his glory, to the knowledge that he had risen from the dead. Why should that belief appear incredible to his hearers? It once had been so to himself; but how could he resist the eye-witness of a noonday vision? and how could he disobey the heavenly voice which sent him forth to open the eyes both of Jews and Gentiles, that they might turn from darkness to light, and the power of Satan unto God, that, by faith in Jesus, they might receive remission of sins and a lot among the sanctified? —Farrar's Life of Paul.