On the morrow, because he would have known the certainty wherefore he was accused of the Jews, he loosed him from his bands, and commanded the chief priests and all their council to appear, and brought Paul down, and set him before them.
On the morrow, because he would have known the certainty wherefore he was accused of the Jews, he loosed him from his bands, and commanded the chief priests and all their council to appear, [holon (G3650) to (G3588) sunedrion (G4892)] - 'the entire Sanhedrim to assemble,'
And brought Paul down, and set him before them. Note here the power to order a Sanhedrim to try this case, assumed by the Roman officers and acquiesced in on their part.
Remarks: Here again one cannot but mark that rare combination of great qualities which made Paul that man of ten thousand which he was. We have seen on Acts 21:1-40 (Remark 2, at the close of that section) how, immediately after being rescued with some difficulty from assassination by the military tribune, and standing manacled on the castle stairs, on his way to the barracks, he pleaded for and obtained permission to address the multitude that stood thick beneath him; and we have now seen what a calm and sublime account he could give in such circumstances of his miraculous conversion to the Lord Jesus on his way to Damascus, and of the vision which he had thereafter of his Lord in the temple, warning him that his efforts to gain his country men in the metropolis would be fruitless-that he must escape from it without delay, and that, instead of making his countrymen his chief care, he was to be sent far away to the Gentiles.
That word, however, "unto the Gentiles," rousing their national prejudices to the uttermost, lashed the mob into a mad fury, which, but for the presence of the tribune, would quickly have produced fatal results. The commanding officer-helpless from his ignorance of the language in which Paul had delivered his address, and concluding that he must be some desperado, and probably an Egyptian, who before that had made insurrection at the head of a formidable baud of assassins-has him tightened with thongs, as already his hands had Been bound with chains, to prepare him for the lash by which he thought to extort from him a confession of his crimes. In these critical circumstances, Paul, rising to the dignity of a Roman citizen, calmly demands of the attendant centurion whether such procedure toward a Roman was legal. This leads to an interview with the tribune himself, who, knowing that if the prisoner were indeed a Roman, he had acted illegally, anxiously questions him on the subject. In this interview, the dignity, calmness, and perfect presence of mind with which the apostle carried himself contrasts finely with the conscious inferiority of the tribune, in point of civil position, to the man whom he had so dishonoured. Accordingly, while the commanding officer is glad to have him loosed from his bonds and handed over to the Sanhedrim for trial, as the proper tribunal, the apostle is just as ready to stand before these ecclesiastics as before he had been to meet face to face the military authority.