Paul tells the audience he's lived his life with a clear conscience and is smacked in the mouth. Hell yeah! Paul curses the chief priest, Ananias and calls him a hypocrite. The others ask him if he knows he's cursing the high priest. Paul does not, and is chastened, because cursing rulers is against the law. Other people are fine, just not leaders. Great moral compass, this book.
Paul realises that the council is made up of Pharisees and Sadducees and claims he's one of the latter. Yesterday he was a Roman. Could you be both? Do I care? No, because this is fiction. Anyway, this causes strife amongst the two groups, not over Paul, but over whether resurrection is possible and angels exist. History is on the side of the Sadducees, who say no to both, but not in this book. The Pharisee scribes now start up, saying if Paul has been talking to angels, they should leave him alone, because otherwise they're fighting god.
The Roman soldiers, fearing that Paul will be torn to pieces, bring him back into the castle. God comes and tells him he's happy with his work in Jerusalem, so he's sending him to Rome.
Meanwhile, 40 Jews vow not to eat or drink anything until they've killed Paul. They go to the chief priests and tell them to call Paul down again tomorrow for questioning, and they'll kill him then.
Paul's nephew overhears this and manages to sneak into the castle to warn his uncle. Paul gets him to tell the captain of the guards, who orders 400 men to take Paul to Caesarea at 3 o'clock in the morning and deposit him with Felix, the governor. Felix reads the letter and decides he'll deal with Paul when his accusers arrive.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment