Acts 12:1

IV. PERSECUTION OF JERUSALEM CHURCH BY HEROD; ITS AVENGING, Acts 12:1-25.

1. James Slain; Peter Imprisoned and Released, Acts 12:1-19 .

1. Now Luke now narrates a persecution less sweeping than the Sauline “havoc,” but severe enough, in addition to the departure of the apostles, to give the Jerusalem Church another check, while the Gentile Church is rising into power.

About that time Contemporaneously with the Antiochian benefaction.

Herod the king This Herod Agrippa I. was the accomplished and fascinating, but wicked, grandson of Herod the Great and Mariamne; his father being the unfortunate Aristobulus, and his sister, Herodias, the adulterous wife of his uncle, Herod Antipas. (See notes on Matthew 2:1; Matthew 16:1-11.) He was born at once a prince and a pauper, with a splendid rank, but no other support than the purses of princely friends. He was the brilliant accident of a variety of romantic fortunes. In the palace of the Emperor Tiberius, having been the special mate of the emperor’s son, he was driven from court at the son’s death, because Tiberius could not bear the sight of one reminding him of the deceased. He wandered into Idumea, and would have committed suicide but for the kindness of his sister, Herodias, who induced her husband, Herod Antipas, to give him an office in the town of Tiberius. Being insulted for his dependence by Antipas, he departed, after various vicissitudes, for Italy, when Tiberius, made aware of his heavy indebtedness to the treasury, forbade him his presence. But having borrowed the whole amount from Antonia, the mother of Claudius, (who was afterward emperor,) Herod Agrippa paid the debt, and became intimate with young Caligula, who was prospective heir to the sceptre. But Tiberius, being informed that Herod Agrippa had expressed to Caligula a wish for the emperor’s speedy death in order that he, Caligula, might succeed, ordered Herod to be chained, clothed as he was in purple, and sent him to prison preparatory for execution. Suddenly news was received of Tiberius’ death, and the jailer forthwith releasing Herod Agrippa, invited him to his table; when, suddenly again, the news being contradicted, he sent the unlucky prince back again in chains to prison. Again the news was confirmed, and Caligula, at the earliest practical period, took him from prison, and made him king of the tetrarchy of Herod Philip. When he came into his new dominions a king, Herodias, whose husband, Antipas, was but a tetrarch, fired with jealousy, forthwith started with her husband to the Roman court to obtain a like royal title. But the object of their embassy being known to Herod Agrippa, when the unhappy pair arrived into the presence of the Emperor Caligula, the emperor received a letter from Herod Agrippa charging Antipas with having seventy thousand stand of arms accumulated for rebellious purposes, and they received sentence of banishment into Lyons, in France, and their tetrarchy was conferred upon Herod Agrippa. Upon Caligula’s death, Claudius, whose friend Herod Agrippa had taken care to be, conferred upon him the kingdom of Judea, so that this man of strange fortunes became, as here we now find him, sovereign of all the dominions of Herod the Great!

Certain of the Church Rather, certain selected from the Church; being, doubtless, its leaders, since if the shepherds are slain the sheep are scattered.

The king Paley remarks upon the striking proof of Luke’s historical accuracy here exhibited. Save the three years of Herod Agrippa’s reign, there had been no king of Judea for thirty years; there never was one after him; yet Luke perfectly incidentally places a king with the right name in the right place.

Hug, in his Introduction to the New Testament, has some striking remarks upon the impossibility that a forger, or even a truthful writer of a later age, should not commit geographical or historical mistakes. Of truthful writers Curtius, Virgil, and even Livy, are found applying the geography of a later to an earlier period. Of forgers, the author of the Life of Apollonius, (a book written as rival to the Gospels,) though claiming to copy his facts from ancient authority, largely describes Babylon as a stupendous city when it was a desert, and confounds the Spartans with the Lacedemonians, making them a free republic when they were the subjects of the Romans. Difficulties of avoiding mistakes are immensely increased when great changes are sweeping in succession for a long time over a country. But seldom in history have revolutions so vast, so constant, so swept a country as these did over Judea during the century of Christ. Changes of geographical names, of forms of government, of boundary lines of countries, were constantly succeeding each other. “Under Hadrian,” says Hug, “fifty important places and nine hundred and eighty-five villages and hamlets were razed to the ground.” The very language of the New Testament writers, a dialect of blended Grecism and Hebraism, was swept away with the overthrow of the Jewish state, and by the next century no one wrote or spoke it.