Acts 9:13

Ananias naturally hesitates to go to a man who had undoubtedly inflicted harm upon the Christians, and had come to Damascus with the same intent. But there is nothing inconsistent in the fact that Ananias should not be acquainted with Saul personally, whilst he knew of his persecuting zeal. τοῖς ἁγίοις σου : used here for the first time as a name for the Christians; cf. Acts 9:32; Acts 9:41; Acts 26:10. Every Israelite was ἅγιος by the mere fact of his membership in the holy Ecclesia of Israel, and Ananias, himself a Jew, does not hesitate to employ the same term of the members of the Christian Ecclesia (see Hort, Ecclesia, pp. 56, 57, and Grimm, sub v., 2). Its use has therefore a deep significance: “Christus habet sanctos, ut suos: ergo est Deus,” says Bengel. The force of the words can be more fully appreciated in connection with the significance of the phrase in Acts 9:14, τοῖς ἐπικ. τὸ ὄνομά σου. In Acts 26:10 it is noticeable that the word occurs on St. Paul's own lips as he stood before Agrippa “in the bitterness of his self-accusation for his acts of persecution, probably in intentional repetition of Ananias's language respecting those same acts of his. It was a phrase that was likely to burn itself into his memory on that occasion.” And so we find St. Paul addressing at least six of his Epistles to those who were “called to be Saints,” indicating that every Christian as such had this high calling. If Christians individually had realised it, the prophetic vision of the Psalms of Solomon (17:36) would have been fulfilled in the early Church of Christ: ὅτι πάντες ἅγιοι, καὶ βασιλεὺς ἀυτῶν Χριστὸς Κύριος (see Ryle and James' edition, p. 141). ἐν Ἱερ. belongs to ἐποίησε, and so points back to Acts 8:3, and to Saul as the soul of the persecution which broke out in Jerusalem, cf. Paul's own language before Agrippa, Acts 26:10.