Book of Common Prayer

^23-24 Then he summoned two of his centurions, and said, “Get two hundred men ready to proceed to Caesarea, with seventy horsemen and two hundred spearmen, by nine o’clock tonight.” (Mounts were also to be provided to carry Paul safely to Felix the governor.)

The Roman view of Paul’s position

^25-30 He further wrote a letter to Felix of which this is a copy: “Claudius Lysias sends greeting to his excellency the governor Felix. “This man had been seized by the Jews and was on the point of being murdered by them when I arrived with my troops and rescued him, since I had discovered that he was a Roman citizen. Wishing to find out what the accusation was that they were making against him, I had him brought down to their Sanhedrin. There I discovered he was being accused over questions of their laws, and that there was no charge against him which deserved either death or imprisonment. Now, however, that I have received private information of a plot against his life, I have sent him to you without delay. At the same time I have notified his accusers that they must make their charges against him in your presence.”

Paul is taken into protective custody

^31-35 The soldiers, acting on their orders, took Paul and, riding through that night, brought him down to Antipatris. Next day they returned to the barracks, leaving the horsemen to accompany him further. They went into Caesarea and after delivering the letter to the governor, they handed Paul over to him. When the governor had read the letter he asked Paul what province he came from, and on learning that he came from Cilicia, he said, “I will hear your case as soon as your accusers arrive.” Then he ordered him to be kept under guard in Herod’s palace.

A test question

^13-15a Later they sent some of the Pharisees and some of the Herod-party to trap him in an argument. They came up and said to him, “Master, we know that you are an honest man and that you are not swayed by men’s opinion of you. Obviously you don’t care for human approval but teach the way of God with the strictest regard for truth—is it right to pay tribute to Caesar or not: are we to pay or not to pay?”

^15b But Jesus saw through their hypocrisy and said to them, “Why try this trick on me? Bring me a coin and let me look at it.”

¹⁶ So they brought one to him. “Whose face is this?” asked Jesus, “and whose name is in the inscription?”

¹⁷ “Caesar’s,” they replied. And Jesus said, “Then give to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God!”—a reply which staggered them.

Jesus reveals the ignorance of the Sadducees

^18-23 Then some of the Sadducees (a party which maintains that there is no resurrection) approached him, and put this question to him, “Master, Moses instructed us that if a man’s brother dies leaving a widow but no child, then the man should marry the woman and raise children for his brother. Now there were seven brothers, and the first one married and died without leaving issue. Then the second one married the widow and died leaving no issue behind him. The same thing happened with the third, and indeed the whole seven died without leaving any child behind them. Finally the woman died. Now in this ‘resurrection’, when men will rise up again, whose wife is she going to be—for she was the wife of all seven of them?”

^24-27 Jesus replied, “Does not this show where you go wrong—and how you fail to understand both the scriptures and the power of God? When people rise from the dead they neither marry nor are they given in marriage; they live like the angels in Heaven. But as for this matter of the dead being raised, have you never read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him in these words, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? God is not God of the dead but of living men! That is where you make your great mistake!”