Acts 24:1

The Trial of St, Paul at Cæsarea before FelixTertullus, on the part of the Sanhedrim, accuses the Apostle, 1-9.

Acts 24:1. And after five days Ananias the high priest descended with the elders. That is to say, five days after Paul's departure with the armed escort from Jerusalem. Roman usage required that a case referred to the higher tribunal like this should be proceeded with as soon as possible. The high priest himself came in person with some of the sanhedrists, as the case was of great importance to the Sadducee party. ‘Descended,' more intelligibly rendered ‘came down,' the usual expression when a journey from the high land on which the old capital was built to the low coast district of Cæsarea is spoken of.

And with a certain orator named Tertullus. The ‘orator' or rhetorician was an advocate acquainted with the forms of Roman law, employed by the Sanhedrim to conduct their cases in the governor's court at Cæsarea; the Latin term is ‘orator forensis' or ‘causidicus.' There were many of these men practising in the provincial governors' courts, some of them thus training themselves for the more important contentions of the Forum in Rome (see Cicero's oration for Cœlius). It has been urged that this address of Tertullus was spoken in the Latin tongue, as originally Latin appears to have been insisted on as the language of the law courts throughout the Empire. But from a passage in Dio Cassius, it seems that under the emperors Greek was permitted, if more convenient to be used, even in Rome itself. It is most improbable that Latin could have been used in a provincial court of Judæa; we may therefore conclude with some certainty that the language used on this occasion was Greek. The alleged Latinisms of the speech of Tertullus sprang naturally from the forms of procedure and certain of the technical terms being originally derived from Rome. The name Tertullus is a common one, being a diminutive of Tertius; Tertullianus, the famous Christian lawyer and writer (A.D. 190-200) in North Africa, is another form of the same name as Tertius or Tertullus. Ewald conjectures this lawyer, employed by the Sanhedrim, was one of the Jerusalem synagogue of the Libertines, mentioned in chap. Acts 6:9, A.D. 33-34.