CRITICAL REMARKS
Acts 18:12. Gallio.—Gallio became proconsul towards the end of Claudius’s reign, about A.D. 53. His character, as depicted by ancient writers, corresponded with that revealed in Luke’s narrative. “He was the very flower of pagan courtesy and pagan culture—a Roman with all a Roman’s dignity and seriousness, and yet with all the grace and versatility of a polished Greek” (Farrar). Eusebius asserts that he committed suicide towards the end of Nero’s reign, before the death of his brother Seneca; but as Tacitus (Annals, xv. 73) reports him alive after that event, Dion Cassius is more likely to be correct in saying that he was put to death by order of Nero. Deputy, or proconsul of Achaia.—See on Acts 13:7. Achaia, which included all Greece south of Macedonia, was a proconsular province under Augustus; under Tiberius an imperial province with a procurator (Tacitus, Annals, i. 76); under Claudius after A.D. 44 a senatorial province with a proconsul as governor. Another instance of Luke’s accuracy. Made insurrection.—Rather, rose up.
Acts 18:13. This fellow.—The expression correctly enough states the feelings of disdain entertained by Paul’s prosecutors, though the word “fellow” has no place in the original.
Acts 18:17. All the Greeks.—The best texts have simply all, though “the Greeks,” not “the Jews” (Ewald, Hofmann, Schürer), is the proper supplement.
HOMILETICAL ANALYSIS.—Acts 18:12-17
Paul before Gallio; or, a Case of Unsuccessful Persecution
I. Persecution attempted.—
1. The prime instigators of this hostile movement. These were the Jews whom Paul had defeated in argument, causing them to oppose and blaspheme (Acts 18:6), and from whom he had separated by withdrawing from their synagogue and exercising his ministry in the house of Justus (Acts 18:7). To this antagonistic course they were doubtless incited by a variety of motives, as, e.g.,
(1) their hatred of the gospel;
(2) their dislike of Paul the apostate Rabbi;
(3) their chagrin at the conversion of Crispus; and
(4) their annoyance at the favour which the new cause was finding among the Greeks. “It must be acknowledged,” says Ramsay (St. Paul, etc., p. 256), “that Paul had not a very conciliatory way with the Jews when he became angry. The shaking out of his garments was undoubtedly a very exasperating gesture; and the occupying of a meeting-house next door to the synagogue, with the former archisynagogos as a prominent officer, was more than human nature could stand.… It is not strange that the next stage of proceedings was in a law court.” Perhaps not; but this seems hard on Paul, who would have been almost superhuman if he had not sometimes lost his temper with his much-beloved countrymen.
2. The exact date of this hostile movement. “When Gallio was the deputy, or proconsul, of Achaia,” A.D. 53 (see “Critical Remarks”). Under Tiberius an imperial province governed by a procurator, Achaia, when Claudius assumed the purple (A.D. 44), was restored to the Senate and ruled by a proconsul. Gallio’s predecessor had ended his term of government, and Gallio himself had just entered on office, when this persecution arose. The Jews had probably been tempted to try this assault upon their obnoxious countryman because of Gallio’s inexperience and reputed easiness of character, the first of which might make him willing to curry favour with the Jews, while the second might lead him to believe their complaints without investigating whether these rested on any good foundation. Originally called Marcus Annæus Novatus, and afterwards known as Lucius Junius Annæus Gallio in consequence of having assumed the name of Lucius Junius Gallio, a friendly rhetorician who had adopted him, Gallio was brother to the well-known philosopher Seneca, who wrote of him: “No mortal man is so sweet to any person as he is to all mankind,” and “even those who love my brother Gallio to the very utmost of their power yet do not love him enough”—language which, if it could scarcely be accepted as unimpeachable evidence of Gallio’s merit, at least testified to the strength of Seneca’s affection.
3. The special form of this hostile movement. A unanimous “insurrection,” or uprising of the Jewish populace against the apostle, in which, having arrested him, they fetched him before the governor’s tribunal, as their kinsmen in Thessalonica had dragged him before the city rulers (Acts 17:6), and as the owners of the divining maid in Philippi had brought him and Silas before the magistrates (Acts 16:20). The accusation in this case ran in different terms from the indictments in those. At Philippi the apostle had been charged with subverting Roman customs in religion; in Thessalonica the complainants urged that he had acted contrary to the decrees of Cæsar; here at Corinth the impeachment alleged that he persuaded men to worship God contrary to law—not of the empire (Spence, Plumptre), but of Moses (Conybeare and Howson, Farrar, Alford, Hackett, Holtzmann, Lechler), since under Roman rule Judaism was a religio licita, and Paul’s teaching in his countrymen’s eyes constituted a violation of the Hebrew Lawgiver’s precepts.
II. Persecution foiled.—Arraigned before the judgment seat of Gallio—a chair or tribunal, three times mentioned in the story, from which Roman justice was dispensed—Paul was about to open his mouth in self-defence, when Gallio interrupted him, quashed the proceedings, and so protected the apostle, but lost to the world and the Church a speech which the latter at least would willingly have heard.
1. The ground of his procedure he made clearly known to the prosecutors.
(1) The case they had brought before him lay not within his civil jurisdiction. Had it been a matter of wrong or wicked lewdness, an act of injustice or legal injury, such as fraud or dishonesty or wicked crime—i.e., a moral offence or deed of wickedness—he would have felt it his duty to bear with them and investigate their charges.
(2) The case, however, was altogether outside his functions. So far as he could see, it concerned questionings or disputes about a word, or doctrine (Hackett), about names, as, e.g., whether Jesus had been rightly or wrongly called Messiah, and about their own law, whether it was correctly observed or not; and these were affairs they could look to themselves. As for him, he had no mind to be a judge of such matters, even if they lay within his judicial domain, which he practically acknowledged they did not. To infer that his action was in any way dictated by secret sympathy for the Christian religion would be, to say the least, extremely hazardous.
2. The end of his procedure was that he summarily quashed the indictment, announced that the prosecutors had no case, and ordered the lictors to clear the court. “We may be sure they made short work of ejecting the frustrated, but muttering, mob on whose disappointed malignity, if his countenance at all reflected the feelings expressed by his words, he must have looked down from his lofty tribunal with undisguised contempt” (Farrar, The Life and Work of St. Paul, i. 569).
III. Persecution reversed.—Before the court was cleared the tables were turned.
1. The ruler of the synagogue was trounced. The Jews who had hastened before the governor’s tribunal in hope of seeing Paul scourged reluctantly beheld their own leader beat. This leader was Sosthenes, who had probably succeeded (Acts 18:8) if he had not been a colleague of Crispus. There is no solid reason for supposing (Theodoret, Calvin, Ewald, Hofmann) him to have been the Sosthenes our brother mentioned in Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians (Acts 1:1).
2. The parties who trounced him were the mob. Not the Jews (Ewald, Hofmann), who suspected their champion had bungled their case through secret sympathy with Paul—which, by the way, forms the ground for supposing him to be “Sosthenes our brother.” Certainly not the Christians, who, had it been they, would have behaved most unworthily (Matthew 5:44), but the Gentiles or Greeks, who may have been impelled to such a violent demonstration, either because Sosthenes showed himself refractory and unwilling to depart from the basilica, or because they felt indignant at the Jews for having trumped up a baseless accusation against an innocent man, whom besides, through his having withdrawn from the synagogue, they regarded as in a manner belonging to themselves.
3. The governor looked on with indifference. “My lord Gallio,” as his brother styled him, was as completely unconcerned about the whipping which the Greeks gave to Sosthenes as he had been about the charges of the Jews preferred against Paul. Perhaps the whipping was, after all, not a violent affair. “So long as they were not guilty of any serious infraction of the peace, it was nothing to him how the Greek gamins amused themselves” (Farrar). If, however, it amounted to bodily injury, then Gallio’s supercilious contempt was not only wrong in itself but stood in flagrant contradiction to his pompous speech (Acts 18:14).
Lessons.—
1. The lies told against Christianity and Christians by their enemies.
2. The true province of the civil magistrate, secular affairs.
3. The retribution which often comes on those who devise evil against others.
4. The indifference of many to both religion and morality.
HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS
Acts 18:12-17. A Court Scene in Corinth.
I. The place of judgment.—The agora or market place. Justice should always be dispensed in public, in order to prevent abuses.
II. The person of the prisoner.—Paul, a preacher of the gospel. Preachers have often been called upon to answer for their crimes in publishing the good news of salvation.
III. The terms of the indictment.—That Paul taught men to worship God contrary to law. It is no sin either to worship God or to teach men so; yet are all ways of worshipping God not equally right.
IV. The rank of the prosecutor.—Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue. The Church’s dignitaries no less than the world’s great men have sometimes been found in the ranks of persecutors.
V. The character of the judge.—Gallio, an indifferent and haughty cynic. Rank and power often lead to such unbecoming dispositions.
VI. The issues of the trial.—
1. To the prisoner, acquittal.
2. To the prosecutor, a beating.
3. To both, perhaps, the unexpected.
A Remarkable Trio; or, a character study.
I. Paul, the representative of religious zeal.
II. Sosthenes, the incarnation of religious intolerance.
III. Gallio, the type of religious indifference.
Sosthenes and Gallio; or, Paul’s accuser and judge.
I. The accuser.—Sosthenes.
1. His person. Successor of Crispus. Perhaps afterwards with Paul in Ephesus and Macedonia (1 Corinthians 1:1).
2. His motives. Mixed.
(1) Responsibility for the dignity of the synagogue.
(2) Anger at Crispus’s defection.
(3) Displeasure at Paul’s success.
3. His action. Having caused Paul to be arrested, he brought the apostle before Gallio’s judgment seat. Often easier to defeat a man at law than to overcome him in logic.
4. His indictment. He accused Paul of persuading men to worship contrary to the law. No civil crime imputed to Paul. Charged with propagating illegal tenets in religion.
II. The judge—Gallio.
1. A remarkable man. Brother of Seneca.
2. A remarkable character. A person of talent and great amiability.
3. A remarkable utterance. “If, indeed, it were a matter of wrong,” etc. Explain what this means (see “Critical Remarks” and “Homiletical Analysis”).
4. A remarkable blunder. Looking on with indifference while Sosthenes was being maltreated.
Gallio’s Action.—“This action of the Imperial government in protecting Paul from the Jews, and (if we are right) declaring freedom in religious matters, seems to have been the crowning fact in determining Paul’s conduct. According to our view, the residence at Corinth was an epoch in Paul’s life. As regards his doctrine, he became more clearly conscious of its character, as well as more precise and definite in his presentation of it; and as regards practical work, he became more clear as to his aim, and the means of attaining the aim—namely, that Christianity should be spread through the civilised—i.e., the Roman—world (not as excluding, but as preparatory to, the entire world, Colossians 3:11), using the freedom of speech which the Imperial policy as declared by Gallio seemed inclined to permit. The action of Gallio, as we understand it, seems to pave the way for Paul’s appeal a few years later from the petty, outlying court of the procurator of Judæa, who was always much under the influence of the ruling party in Jerusalem, to the supreme tribunal of the empire.”—Ramsay, St. Paul, etc., pp. 259, 260.
Acts 18:14-17. Gallio’s Behaviour.
I. How far it was right.—
1. In declining to interfere in the settlement of religious questions.
2. In expressing his readiness to investigate civil complaints.
II. How far it was wrong.—
1. In not troubling himself to arrive at the truth about Paul.
2. In taking no cognisance of injustice towards Sosthenes.
Gallio, the Civil Magistrate.
I. His judicial equity and impartiality.
II. His legal intelligence and discrimination.
III. His moral and religious indifference.