Acts 24:14 - Exposition

A sect for heresy, A.V.; serve for worship, A.V.; our for my , A.V. ( my is better, as following "I serve," and addressed to a Roman judge); which are according to the Law, and which are written in the prophets for which are written in the Law and in the prophets, A.V. A sect, This, of course, refers to this expression of Tertullus in Acts 24:5 , πρωτοστάτης τῆς τῶν ναζωραίων αἱρέσεως , "Ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes." The word αἵρεσις , which means primarily "choice," has not necessarily or even ordinarily a bad sense. In classical Greek its secondary sense was a "sect" or "school" of philosophy, Academics, Peripatetics, Stoics, Epicureans, etc. The Jews applied it to their own different schools of thought. So in Acts 5:17 we read, αἵρεσις τῶν σαδδουκαίων , " The sect of the Sadducees;" in Acts 15:5 , αἵρεσις τῶν φαρισαίων , " The sect of the Pharisees;" in Acts 26:5 St. Paul speaks of himself as having been a Pharisee, κατὰ τὴν ἀκριβεστάτην αἵρεσιν τῆς ἡμετέρας θρησκείας , "After the straitest sect of our religion" (see too Acts 28:22 ). It begins to have a bad sense in St. Paul's Epistles ( 1 Corinthians 11:19 ; Galatians 5:20 ; and 2 Peter 2:1 , αἱρέσεις ἀπωλείας , where, however, it gets its bad sense from the ἀπωλείας joined to it). In ecclesiastical writers it came to have its worst sense of "heresy" as something worse even than " schism. '' In this reference to Tertullus's phrase, St. Paul seems hardly to admit that Christianity was properly called "a sect" by the Jews, but gives it the milder term of "the Way" (see Acts 9:2 , note). The God of our [my] father ( τῷ πατρῳ θεῷ ); comp. Galatians 1:14 ; and Acts 22:3 ; Acts 28:17 . Observe how St. Paul throughout insists that, in becoming a Christian, he had not been disloyal to Moses, or the Law, or the prophets, or to the religion of his fathers, but quite the contrary. According to the Law . κατὰ τὸν νόμον may mean either, as in the R.V., "according to the Law," or, as Meyer takes it, "throughout the Law," and then is better coupled, as in the A.V., with τοῖς γεγραμμένοις . The Law, and … the prophets (as Matthew 5:17 ; Luke 24:27 , Luke 24:44 ).