Acts 22:29

Acts 22:29. Then straightway they departed from him which should have examined him. That is to say, those soldiers who with the centurion were about to carry the sentence of scourging into execution. It is noticeable how the word rendered ‘should have examined' had acquired the sense of ‘examining by torture.'

The chief captain also was afraid, after he knew that he was a Roman, and because he had bound him. The old magical power of the words, Civis Romanus sum, ‘ I am a Roman citizen,' was by no means gone when Paul spoke to the soldiers of the tower of Antonia. Although the stern rules which once forbade torture to be applied to any citizen of Rome had been violated even so early as the time of Tiberius, when torture was endured by citizens of the highest rank, still we imagine for a long while provincial officials would stand in awe of the old name which once was so venerated and still bore with it many precious privileges. On this occasion his claim to the citizenship saved him from the lictor's rods, though he still remained ‘bound;' for Acts 22:30 tells us he was not ‘loosed from his bands' until the morrow, when he was brought before the Sanhedrim. There is no doubt but that the statement of Acts 22:29, which states how ‘the chief captain was afraid' because he had bound a Roman, refers not to the fact simply of his being fettered, but to his having been fastened to the pillar to receive the blows of the rods.