Acts 28:17

Acts 28:17. And it came to pass, that after three days Paul called the chief of the Jews together. The Book of the ‘Acts' tells us of the loving, restless activity of Paul to the last. Before the prisoner's arrival at the imperial city, some of the Christians of Rome had met him at Appii Forum and the Three Taverns (Acts 28:15). With these brethren in the faith, and with others who no doubt at once sought out and visited the famous Christian missionary in his prison lodging, Paul spent his three first days in Rome. On the fourth day he invited the leading Jews of the Hebrew colony to visit him. The Jewish colony in Rome was a large one; they dwelt in one quarter of the city, the ‘Trastevere,' or district beyond the river. When a petition was sent from Jerusalem to the Roman Emperor against Archelaus, son of Herod the Great, Josephus tells us 8000 Jews resident in Rome supported it. This Jewish community ‘had its first beginning in the captives brought by Pompey after his eastern campaign. Many of them were manumitted; and thus a great proportion of the Jews in Rome were freedmen. Frequent accessions to their numbers were made as years went on, chiefly owing to the mercantile relations which subsisted between Rome and the East. Many of them were wealthy, and large sums were sent annually for religious purposes from Italy to the mother country' (Howson, St. Paul). These Jews had been banished from the imperial city by a decree of Claudius, A.D. 49; but this decree, some time before Paul's arrival as a prisoner at Rome, had been rescinded or allowed to lapse. Probably this favour had been procured through the influence of Poppæa, at this time all-powerful with the Emperor Nero. Poppæa was a proselyte to Judaism. The chiefs of the Jews here alluded to included the rulers and elders of the synagogues and heads of the principal Jewish families settled in Rome, with the scribes and probably the wealthier traders.

Men and brethren, though I have committed nothing against the people or customs of our fathers, yet was I delivered prisoner from Jerusalem into the hands of the Romans. Here in Rome, as in all the great centres where he had preached during the last twenty years, Paul begins his work among his own loved race. Here, as had been his unvarying custom, he seeks to win his listeners by the most studied courtesy, and addresses these haughty Jews by the name they so persistently, even in exile and humiliation, arrogated to themselves, the people, dwelling with reverence on the memory of the customs of our fathers. ‘ Unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews; to them that are under the law , as under the law' (1 Corinthians 9:20). Paul's loving life-work had been in truth the glorification of Judaism of true Judaism. He had taught that his Master's religion was nothing but the development of the religion of Moses, only world-wide instead of being confined to one race. Much of the bitter enmity he had evoked sprang from the utter inability of his selfish, narrow-minded countrymen to disprove his references to the words of the great Hebrew prophets, foretelling the development of the old Hebrew faith into a worldwide religion.