Acts 22:5

Acts 22:5. As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders. The ‘high priest' in question was not the person holding that office at the present juncture, but the one who happened, at the time of the Damascus Mission, A.D. 37, to be in possession of that high office. The high priest who with the Sanhedrim gave Paul his credentials as inquisitor for Damascus and Syria, was probably Jonathan the successor and brother of Caiaphas. The reigning high priest at this period, A.D. 58, was Ananias. We have before noticed that in these last days of the Jewish power, the high-priestly office and dignity were not permanent, but were constantly transferred from one holder to another, the Roman authority claiming and exercising this right of raising and deposing the Jewish high priest. Claudius Cæsar, the emperor, had conceded the privilege of naming the high priest to Agrippa II. This prince had nominated Ananias. The deposed high priest of A.D. 37 was however doubtless one of the members of the Sanhedrim council.

‘The estate of the elders' more likely is a term used for the Sanhedrim. There were many, probably, in that venerable body who remembered well the young Pharisee, ‘the zealot Saul,' and the brilliant promise he gave in old days of becoming one of the foremost men in the Pharisee party.

From whom also I received letters unto the brethren. That is, to the chiefs of the Syrian synagogues resident in Damascus and elsewhere. He uses the term ‘brethren' to show how, now as then, he regarded his fellow-countrymen the Jews as ‘his brethren,' and how he looked on their interests as his. It is also noticeable that the term ‘brethren ‘was used by the Jews first, and that, like so much else that belonged to the synagogue and its life, the expression passed to the Christians, and became among the members of the Church of Jesus of Nazareth, indeed, a household word. Paul was armed on that occasion with letters from the Sanhedrim, from whose commands and decisions in ecclesiastical.affairs there was no appeal.

For to be punished. By imprisonment, scourging, and, as in the case of Stephen, by a cruel death.