Acts 5:30

Acts 5:30. The God of our fathers. Identifying himself, in the words ‘our fathers,' with the glorious line of patriarchs, prophets, and kings whom the children of Israel in their then state of humiliation and subjection remembered with so passionate a love; while he pointed to Jehovah, the Mighty One of Jacob, as the God who had raised up Jesus, raised up not in this place ‘from the dead,' as Meyer, following Chrysostom and others, would understand it, but raised up from the seed of David as the Sent of God. This interpretation, adopted by Calvin, Bengel, De Wette, etc., admirably agrees with the order in time of the events named by Peter, ‘raised up from the seed of David,' ‘slain by you,' ‘exalted to all power.' Jesus, the beloved name, shunned and dreaded, and then left unnamed by the high priest, but gloried in by the accused apostle, who makes it the central point of his defence.

Whom ye slew. The Greek word is chosen with pointed significance: ‘And this Glorious One, the Sent of the God of our fathers, ye slew with your own hands.'

And hanged on a tree. The cross is here called ‘a tree,' a well-known expression to those learned Jewish priests and rabbis who sat in the great council; they would too well remember how, in their sacred law, this death was pronounced accursed (see Deuteronomy 21:23).