Paul’s Arrest and Imprisonment at Caesarea

When Paul reached Jerusalem, James and the elders told him that thousands of Jewish believers, all zealous for the law, had heard that he taught Jews to abandon Moses. On their advice he joined four men who were under a vow and paid their expenses in the temple (Acts 21:17–26). There Jews from Asia seized him, shouting that he had brought Greeks into the holy place. The crowd dragged him out and was beating him when the Roman tribune, Claudius Lysias, came down with soldiers and put him in chains (Acts 21:27–36) (Acts 23:26). The tribune at first took him for the Egyptian who had lately led four thousand men into the wilderness (Acts 21:38); Josephus tells of an Egyptian prophet, with thirty thousand followers by his count, whose following Felix scattered at the Mount of Olives (Josephus, Jewish War 2.261–263).

Paul addressed the crowd from the barracks steps, avoided a flogging by declaring that he was a Roman citizen, and was brought before the council, where his claim to stand for the resurrection of the dead divided Pharisees from Sadducees (Acts 21:40–22:29) (Acts 22:30–23:10). Learning that more than forty men had sworn to kill him, the tribune sent him by night under guard to the governor at Caesarea Maritima (Acts 23:12–35).

The governor was Felix, a brother of Pallas, who had married Drusilla, a sister of King Agrippa (Josephus, Antiquities 20.137–143). Tacitus calls him a freedman and says that he exercised a king’s power in the spirit of a slave (Tacitus, Histories 5.9). The high priest Ananias and an advocate charged Paul with stirring up riots as a leader of “the sect of the Nazarenes” and with trying to profane the temple; Paul replied that he had come to bring alms to his nation (Acts 24:1–21). Felix put off a decision, hoped for a bribe, and left Paul in custody for two years (Acts 24:22–27).

His successor, Porcius Festus, proposed a trial in Jerusalem. Paul refused and appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:1–12). Before sending him, Festus set the case before Agrippa and Bernice, who was the king’s sister (Josephus, Antiquities 19.354). Paul told once more how he had been turned from persecutor to preacher, and Agrippa said that the man could have been released if he had not appealed (Acts 25:13–26:32).

Acts records the judgment of the tribune, of Festus and of Agrippa that Paul had done nothing deserving death (Acts 23:29) (Acts 25:25) (Acts 26:31). The appeal took him to Rome as a prisoner (Acts 27:1; 28:16). This account rests on Acts alone among the sources cited here; the passages of Josephus on the governors and the king do not mention Paul.