Acts 4:1-4

Imprisonment of Peter and John, 1-4.

The ever-increasing crowd (see Acts 4:4) seems to have called the attention of the temple authorities to the miracle and the subsequent teaching of Peter and John.

The Priests. The particular course on duty at the Temple during that week. The original division by King David of the priests into twenty-four orders or courses, each of which had charge of the Temple services for a week at a time, had probably been revived after the captivity; the particular duties from day to day were assigned to individuals by lot (see Leviticus 1:9).

Captain of the temple. Not, as some have supposed, the Roman officer in command at the tower of Antonia, but the Jewish priest in command of the Levite guard of the Temple. The Romans seldom appear in the Acts as hostile to followers of Jesus.

And the Sadducees. This is the first mention in the Acts of the bitterest enemies of the little Church of the first days. Everything which seemed to teach the doctrine of the future life was especially hateful to the Sadducee leaders. This sect rejected all that mass of oral tradition which entered at this period so largely into the teaching of the most popular Jewish schools. It professed to accept, however, the written word (not merely the books of Moses) as the rule of faith. It affirmed, as their foundation doctrine, that this life was the whole of man's existence. The creed of the Sadducees seems to have been purely materialistic, denying the existence of angel and Spirit. Their importance and power at the time was clearly out of proportion to their real numbers, but they included in their ranks many of the most influential of the nation. The high priest's family appears to have consisted mainly of Sadducees (see Acts 5:17). Josephus mentions another son of Annas, subsequently high priest, as a Sadducee. During the earthly ministry of Jesus, it is the Pharisees who constantly appear as His bitter unrelenting foes: it was with them and their formalism and hypocrisy that He constantly came into collision; but when once the fact of the resurrection of the Master was taught by His disciples, and believed by ever-increasing thousands, the Sadducees, alarmed at the ready reception by so many of this great truth, fearful lest their whole system, which it directly contradicted, should be undermined, and their influence destroyed, endeavoured with all their power to stamp out the teaching of the Apostles. On the other hand, hints seem to be given us in this book (Acts 5:34-35), that the Pharisees, after the resurrection, relaxed their hostility towards the disciples of Jesus, partly influenced by the hatred shown by the Sadducee party, partly persuaded by a teaching which in many points agreed with their own doctrine (see also John 19:39).