Acts 13:39

So far the words represent the entire harmony between the preaching of St. Peter and St. Paul, and there is no reason to attribute this verse, as also Acts 10:43, with Jüngst, to any reviser; δικαιοῦσθαι ἀπό only elsewhere in Romans 6:7. But if St. Paul's next words seem to imply that within certain limits, i.e., so far as it was obeyed, the law of Moses brought justification, they affirm at the same time the utter inefficacy of all legal obedience, since one thing was certain, that the law exacted much more than Israel could obey; complete justification must be found, if anywhere, elsewhere. Can we doubt that St. Paul is here giving us what was really his own experience? (See Briggs, Messiah of the Apostles, p. 76.) In spite of all his efforts to fulfil the law, there was still the feeling that these efforts were hopelessly deficient; there was an area of transgression in which the law, so far from justifying, condemned. But in the Messiah, the Holy One of God, he saw a realisation of that perfect holiness to which in the weakness of the flesh he could not attain, and in Him, Who died, and rose again, for us that Righteous One, Whom he saw, not only on the road to Damascus, but ever on his right hand by the eye of faith he found complete and full justification. That this forgiveness of sins is not connected specially with the Death of Christ, but with His Resurrection, or rather with His whole Messianic character, to which the Resurrection put the final seal, is certainly not to be regarded as an indication of a non-Pauline view, cf. Romans 4:25; Romans 8:34; 2 Corinthians 5:15. Moreover, if we consider the connection of the whole address, the Resurrection is not regarded apart from the Death of Christ: Acts 13:26-29 show us that the Message of Salvation starts from the Death of Christ, and is based upon that, cf. Bethge, Die Paulinischen Reden, p. 54. It is unreasonable to complain that St. Paul's conception of justification in this address falls below his characteristic and controlling idea of it (McGiffert, p. 186). We could not justly expect that the Apostle's utterances, thus summarised by St. Luke, would contain as full and complete a doctrinal exposition as his Galatian and Roman Epistles. To the former Epistle McGiffert points as giving us what Paul actually taught in Galatia; but there is no contradiction between the teaching given us in St. Luke's account of the address in Pisidian Antioch and St. Paul's account of his teaching to his converts in his letter “the coincidences between the two are so striking as to make each the best commentary on the other … and there is no such close resemblance between the Epistle and any other of Paul's addresses reported in Acts,” Ramsay, Expositor, December, 1898. “Historical Commentary on Gal.” see below, and also Lightfoot, on Galatians 3:11. St. Paul's teaching is essentially the same in the synagogue at Antioch as when he is writing to his Galatian converts: only in Christ is justification, and in the law as such there is no forgiveness of sins. He does not say in so many words that there was no sin from which men could be freed under the law of Moses, but it is evident that the most solemn warning with which the Apostle follows up his declaration could only be justified on the ground that some essential principle was involved in the acceptance or rejection of the work of Christ. On δικαιόω in classical literature, in LXX, and in N.T., see Kennedy, Sources of N. T. Greek, pp. 104, 105, and Sanday and Headlam, Romans, pp. 30, 31.