Acts 28:30

Roman Residence and Ministry , Acts 28:30-31 .

30. Two whole years A whole two-year. It is clear from this that Paul was released from his first Roman imprisonment at the close of two years.

Own hired house For the payment for which, as he seems not to have had the means of labouring at his occupation, he was doubtless aided by the Christian Churches. Whether this hired house was the same as the lodging in Acts 28:23 is uncertain and very unimportant.

Received all Was ready to give his attention to every coming inquirer, preaching to the full congregation, and teaching the individual inquirer.

No… forbidding The Romans not having the wish, and the Jews not having the courage, to interfere. Here then in the imperial city the Jew rejects and is rejected, and Christianity has struck her immovable root in representative Gentile soil.

As Luke’s purpose is not to write a biography of Paul, but a history of this great transition, his task is now complete, and his pen ceases its work. (See page 10.)

If we wish to know the spirit with which Paul was animated during this imprisonment we must study his four Epistles then written, remembering the bonds, fettered as he was to a soldier in his own hired house, or in the prison, in which he wrote:

1 . His EPISTLE TO THE Colossians.

2 . His fraternal note to Philemon.

3 . His EPISTLE TO THE Ephesians.

4 . His EPISTLE TO THE Philippians.

Two opinions exist, as we have already noted, as to the date of the martyrdom of St. Paul. One (as Conybeare and Howson and Alford) maintains that after his first imprisonment and trial (62-64) he was acquitted, travelled, preached, wrote his Epistles to TIMOTHY and to TITUS, and was again arrested, tried, and executed in A.D. 66-68. The other (Schaff and Pressense) that he was martyred upon his first trial before the fulness of the Neronian persecution, A.D. 64. It is agreed that he was not crucified, but, as a Roman citizen, executed with the axe. He was led for death to the Aquae Salviae and buried in the road to Ostia. Peter, it is said, was on the same day crucified at Rome and buried in the Vatican. Caius, a Roman presbyter, about A.D. 212 could make the Christian boast, “I am able to point out the Christian trophies of the apostles, for if you go to the Vatican or to the Ostian Way you will find the mementoes of those who founded this Church.”