Acts 25:23

Acts 25:23. And on the morrow, when Agrippa was come, and Bernice, with great pomp. The account here reads as the description of one who had witnessed the events of that day so memorable in early Christian annals. The splendour of the procession and the glittering appearance of the court, crowded with those royal and princely personages and their retinue, Roman and Jewish guards, the Sanhedrim officials, the stately garb of the high priest and his fellows, the heads of the hierarchy of Israel, must have been very striking; all honour on this occasion was evidently shown to King Agrippa II., the last Jew who legally bore the proud royal title; the same city, some eighteen years before, had witnessed a still more stately scene, a pomp more truly royal, when the father of this king, Herod, was stricken by the angel of the Lord as a punishment for his pride, because, we read, ‘he gave not God the glory' (Acts 12:23). The word translated ‘pomp' (φαντσία), in Polybius, Plutarch, and later Greek writers, is frequently used in this sense. The earlier signification of the term was simply ‘appearance,' a lively image in the mind, as it has been described.

With the chief captains. That is, the principal officers of the Roman garrison of Cæsarea, the headquarters of the army of Judæa. We have here one of the direct and perhaps one of the earliest fulfilments of the prophecy of the Lord Jesus to His servants, ‘Ye shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them' (Matthew 10:18).