Acts 23:5

Acts 23:5. Then said Paul, I wist not, brethren, that he was the high priest: for it is written, Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people. What is meant by these words? ‘I wist not (ου ̓ κ ἤ ͅ δειν) that he was the high priest.' Several well-meant but mistaken interpretations have been suggested in order to avoid what seems the only correct conclusion, viz. that Paul on this occasion ‘spoke unadvisedly with his lips,' a fault which the noble-hearted man was himself, as we shall see, swift to acknowledge. Of these, the following are the principal: (a) Paul did not personally know the high priest. He had been absent save on his very few brief visits for so many years (between twenty and thirty) from Jerusalem, and the high priest was so frequently changed, that he did not know this high priest Ananias by sight, (b) ‘ I wist not;' in other words, Paul said: I did not know that it was the president of the Sanhedrim who was addressing me. I heard, indeed, a voice commanding the rough officer to smite me on the mouth; but my dim vision prevented me from distinguishing the speaker, (c) Paul would not acknowledge one who could thus transgress the law, who could forget himself so far as to give such an unjust and cruel command as the order to smite on the mouth a defenceless prisoner pleading for his life before so august a court- This interpretation of the words would then understand them as spoken ‘ironically.' (d) The apostle did not consider that Ananias was the lawful high priest. He looked on him only as the puppet set up by Rome, or Rome's agent, the younger Agrippa, and not as the legally constituted head of the sacred Jewish hierarchy. But of these (a), (c), and (d) are quite unsatisfactory, mere baseless suppositions; while (b) is refuted by the fact already referred to in these notes. Paul (Acts 23:3) speaks expressly to the president ‘sitting there to judge him after the law;' so the dimness of his eyesight cannot be pleaded as an excuse. It is better then to concede, as we have done above (see note on Acts 23:3), that Paul, at once recognising he was wrong, simply and truthfully confesses that when he had uttered the reviling angry words, he had not considered that it was the high priest of Israel whom he was addressing. We might paraphrase Paul's words thus: I spake the angry words without reflection. I thought at that moment of bitter indignation nothing of high priest or president of the supreme council of Israel. Had I reflected, I had never spoken thus; for it is written in the sacred law, which I reverence with as deep a veneration as any of you, ‘ Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people.' This quotation is verbatim from the Septuagint Version of Exodus 22:28.