Acts 25:26

Acts 25:26. Of whom I have no certain thing to write unto my lord. It was the rule in these cases of appeal from the provincial magistrate to the supreme court at Rome, to transmit a detailed account of the crime alleged, and also a full report of any legal proceedings which had taken place in connection with it. Such a report was called ‘literæ dimissoriæ.' Festus was thoroughly perplexed in the case of Paul. It is quite clear his own feelings led him to look on his prisoner as innocent, but the reiterated and urgent pressure for his condemnation on the part of the supreme council led him to suspect that there was more in the accusation than met the eye, and that only one conversant with the internal condition of the distracted country could possibly grasp the real significance of Paul's guilt. So, before writing his official report to send with the prisoner to the capital, Festus welcomes the assistance of one so well versed in Jewish religious and political matter as King Agrippa. The expression, ‘to write unto my lord' (τω ͂ͅ κυρι ́ ω ͅ). is a proof (one of very many) of the historical accuracy of the compiler of these ‘Acts.' A few years earlier, such a title used to the Cæsar at Rome would have been a mistake. The earlier emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, and Nero, refused this appellation. Augustus, writes Suetonius (Augustus), always abhorred the title ‘lord' as ill-omened. He would not even allow his children or grandchildren, in jest or earnest, so to address him. Even Tiberius was equally averse to the adulatory title. Caligula was the first, apparently, who permitted it. Herod Agrippa, we know, used it to Claudius; and from the time of Domitian it became a recognised portion of their ordinary appellation. Pliny addressed the Emperor Trajan as ‘my lord Trajan.' We first find it on the coins of Antoninus Pius. It was henceforth customary to address the emperors as deities. Thus we read such sentences as this, ‘Edictum Domini Deique nostri.'

I have brought him... specially before thee, O King Agrippa. Stier (Words of the Apostles) writes on this standing and pleading before Agrippa: ‘Yet more and more complete must the giving of witness be in these parts before the martyr sets out for Rome. In Jerusalem the long-suffering of the Lord towards the rejecters of the gospel was now exhausted. In Antioch, where the president of Syria resided, the new mother Church of Jewish and Gentile Christians was flourishing; here in Cæsarea, the dwelling of the procurator (of Judæa), the testimony which had begun in the house of Cornelius the centurion had now risen upward, till it comes before the brilliant assembly of all the local authorities, in the presence of the last king of the Jews.'