Paul Defends Himself before Agrippa

26Agrippa said to Paul, ‘You have permission to speak for yourself.’ Then Paul stretched out his hand and began to defend himself:

2 ‘I consider myself fortunate that it is before you, King Agrippa, I am to make my defence today against all the accusations of the Jews,³because you are especially familiar with all the customs and controversies of the Jews; therefore I beg of you to listen to me patiently.

4 ‘All the Jews know my way of life from my youth, a life spent from the beginning among my own people and in Jerusalem.⁵They have known for a long time, if they are willing to testify, that I have belonged to the strictest sect of our religion and lived as a Pharisee.⁶And now I stand here on trial on account of my hope in the promise made by God to our ancestors,⁷a promise that our twelve tribes hope to attain, as they earnestly worship day and night. It is for this hope, your Excellency,^* that I am accused by Jews!⁸Why is it thought incredible by any of you that God raises the dead?

9 ‘Indeed, I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things against the name of Jesus of Nazareth.^*10And that is what I did in Jerusalem; with authority received from the chief priests, I not only locked up many of the saints in prison, but I also cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death.¹¹By punishing them often in all the synagogues I tried to force them to blaspheme; and since I was so furiously enraged at them, I pursued them even to foreign cities.

Paul Tells of His Conversion

12 ‘With this in mind, I was travelling to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests,¹³when at midday along the road, your Excellency,^* I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions.¹⁴When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew^* language, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.”¹⁵I asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The Lord answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting.¹⁶But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me^* and to those in which I will appear to you.¹⁷I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you¹⁸to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.”

Paul Tells of His Preaching

19 ‘After that, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision,²⁰but declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God and do deeds consistent with repentance.²¹For this reason the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me.²²To this day I have had help from God, and so I stand here, testifying to both small and great, saying nothing but what the prophets and Moses said would take place:²³that the Messiah^* must suffer, and that, by being the first to rise from the dead, he would proclaim light both to our people and to the Gentiles.’

Jews burned in reaction to the plague

This is the third time Luke (author of The Acts) has depicted Paul recounting his conversion-a thing that he never does, except with the umost brevity, in his letters. I think we may conclude that these speeches are Luke’s way of helping the great Apostle, many years dead at the time of Luke’s composition, to speak for himself. The problem is that Luke doesn’t appear to know any of the distinctive aspects of Paul’s message, other than his calling to take the gospel to the Gentiles. The Paul presented here has nothing to say about living in the weakness of the cross; nothing about freedom from the Torah; nothing about God’s ultimate plan for his own people; nothing about being “in Christ.” from his historical perspective Luke sees Paul as the one who made faith in Jesus an international mission and the church an international community, in continuation of the ministry of Jesus. This is a legitimate interpretation of Paul, except that it incorporates the anachronism of Luke’s view of Judaism. In his time, after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, a stricter Judaism had expelled Christians from the synagogues, and a more international Christianity had begun to leave its parent religion behind. Luke projects this separation and its accompanying misrepresentations, back into the time of Paul, just as the writer of John’ gospel projects it back into the time of Jesus.

Paul himself took a much more nuanced view of Judaism (read the second half of his letter to Romans) than is evident in Luke’s reconstruction. This is part of the tangled history of the two faiths including the repeated persecutions of Jews in Europe over more than a thousand years. Perhaps at this point its good to note that the antagonistic characatures of of the two faiths produced around AD70-Christianity as a lawless and imperialistic religion/ Judaism as inward-looking, land- obssessed and violent;- have just a pinch of truth in them.

Luke 8:26-39

Jesus Heals the Gerasene Demoniac

26 Then they arrived at the country of the Gerasenes,^* which is opposite Galilee.²⁷As he stepped out on land, a man of the city who had demons met him. For a long time he had worn^* no clothes, and he did not live in a house but in the tombs.²⁸When he saw Jesus, he fell down before him and shouted at the top of his voice, ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me’—²⁹for Jesus^* had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many times it had seized him; he was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the wilds.)³⁰Jesus then asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He said, ‘Legion’; for many demons had entered him.³¹They begged him not to order them to go back into the abyss.

32 Now there on the hillside a large herd of swine was feeding; and the demons^* begged Jesus^* to let them enter these. So he gave them permission.³³Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

34 When the swineherds saw what had happened, they ran off and told it in the city and in the country.³⁵Then people came out to see what had happened, and when they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. And they were afraid.³⁶Those who had seen it told them how the one who had been possessed by demons had been healed.³⁷Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes^* asked Jesus^* to leave them; for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.³⁸The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him; but Jesus^* sent him away, saying,³⁹‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ So he went away, proclaiming throughout the city how much Jesus had done for him.

possessed

Luke is using his source, the Gospel of Mark, making little changes to improve what he found there. Mark gives a more vivid and violent image of the madman, cutting himself with stones and breaking the bonds by which sympathetic people tried to restrain him. Mark gives us a man violently self-destructive who thinks he’s the Roman Army, which had doubtless, conquered this territory. Certainly his account has something to do with the conquest of Palestine by the Empire.

Luke takes a similar but gentler view. This area, which lay beyond the borders of Israel, probably seemed to him a prototype of Gentile territory, immersed in idolatry and subject to the powers of demons. Jesus goes into this unsafe territory to bring the authoritative compassion of God to a possessed man. The Gersasenes however, as also reported by Mark, are more scared of the one who has healed their local maniac than of the maniac himself. The man becomes a willing apostle of Jesus amongst his own people. Perhaps for Luke the gentile mission starts here.

….but what about the pigs? It amazes me that people who are quite content to have pigs penned and killed for their breakfast, suddenly develop a pig-conscience when faced with this story. Nevertheless, Christians who are happy, like me, to trust the gospel pictures of Jesus for all that is wonderful about him, cannot simply brush this aside. I don’t think Jesus actually sent evil spirits into pigs, but the picture of him handed down to the gospel writers was such that they believed him capable of doing so. There are wilder elements in the Christian memory of Jesus than well-behaved modern Christians find congenial.