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The charges against Paul:
v. 5. For we have found this man a pestilent fellow and a mover of sedition among all the Jews throughout the world and a ringleader of the sect of the Nazarenes;
v. 6. who also hath gone about to profane the Temple; whom we took and would have judged according to our Law.
v. 7. But the chief captain Lysias came upon us, and with great violence took him away out of our hands,
v. 8. commanding his accusers to come unto thee; by examining of whom thyself mayest take knowledge of all these things whereof we accuse him.
v. 9. And the Jews also assented, saying that these things were so.
After the rhetorical promise of the introduction, the statement of the charges against Paul is all the weaker by contrast. Tertullus declares that the Jews found this man a regular pest, an exceedingly bad and wicked person; an inciter of seditions to all the Jews in the whole world, throughout the length and breadth of the Roman Empire, a destroyer of all peace and order by creating bickerings; a ringleader of the sect of Nazarenes, the contemptuous epithet applied to the followers of Jesus. This man, against whom these charges were preferred, had, as the crowning indignity of his career and as an expression of the low character ascribed to him, made an attempt to profane the Temple. The Jews had thereupon apprehended, arrested him, with the intention, as Tertullus asserts, of giving him a fair trial according to their Law. That was again straining the truth with a vengeance, for the affair in the Temple had been the action of the mob violence of the people, and could be interpreted in no other way. But Lysias, the chiliarch, as the attorney states with a great show of outraged justice, had come upon them and had led the prisoner away, out of their hands, with great force, with armed violence, thus interfering, as Tertullus implied, with the Law according to which the Jews were permitted by the Romans to put any person to death that profaned the Temple. And then Lysias had commanded the accusers of Paul to go to the governor, and the latter could now,—so the attorney concludes his speech,—by examining the prisoner, gain an understanding, come to a conclusion, in regard to the accusations which they brought against him. His decision, as the tone of Tertullus implies, could not possibly be made otherwise than in favor of the Jews. It was a fine fabric of lies which the skillful lawyer had constructed by distorting the facts, adding motives that had not existed at the time when certain deeds were performed, and making statements concerning the character of the prisoner which were nothing but calumnies. But the Jews joined in the charge, confirming their lawyer's words, and falsely alleging that all those things were true, that such were the facts in the case. By such means do unbelievers and enemies of Christ attempt to hinder and destroy the truth.