49 resurrection that God made to the patriarchs, and to which all twelve tribes hoped to attain (Acts 26:6-8). Later in that same speech before Agrippa, Paul stated that all of his preaching and teaching about the resurrection (and everything else) came straight out of the Old Testament prophets and Moses (Acts 26:22-23). This means that the Pharisee view of the resurrection (the Individual Body View) must have been the view that was taught throughout the Old Testament, otherwise Paul is not only guilty of deceiving the Pharisees, but falsely teaching King Agrippa II as well, who knew what the Old Testament prophets taught (see Acts 26:27). Our futurist critics have seen this problem, and have relentlessly challenged us on it. To date, the Collective Body advocates have not done a satisfying job of answering it. However, it is not a problem at all for the Individual Body View advocates. We simply affirm, like Paul and the Pharisees, that at the Parousia the souls of the Old Testament dead saints would be raised out of Hades and judged.
June 58 – More than forty Jews plotted to kill Paul
Before they ate or drank. They never were able to carry out their plot, so there must have been some pretty hungry conspirators who would have been required to go to the temple and present a costly sacrifice to the priest for breaking their oath (see Lev. 5:4-13). The priests in the temple would have eaten well that day! The plot was overheard by Paul’s nephew and he went to Paul in prison and told him about it. Paul had a sister living there in Jerusalem at that time (Summer AD 58), whose son found out about the plot to kill Paul and went to the prison to inform his uncle Paul about it (Acts 23:16-22). The Roman commander Lysias decided to get Paul out of Jerusalem and have him taken to Caesarea under cover of night. Then the Jewish leaders had to come down to Caesarea to present their case before Felix the Roman governor (who had a Jewish wife, Drusilla, the daughter of Agrippa I, and sister to Agrippa II and Bernice). The case was never decided by Felix, so Paul remained in prison there in Caesarea for two years (Acts 23:23-35; 24:27). Felix gave Paul some freedom in prison and allowed his friends to minister to him. (Acts 24:22-27) At his trial in Jerusalem, and in his multiple court appearances in Caesarea, Paul did not refrain from boldly declaring the gospel to the Roman and Jewish rulers. It was in Paul’s hearing before Festus and Agrippa in Caesarea that he said there was “about to be a resurrection of both the righteous and the wicked.” He also mentioned the resurrection in his Jerusalem trial before the Sanhedrin. In Martin Hengel’s masterful work on The Zealots, he talks about this “conspiracy of forty men,” and says that it “shows there were certain links between the ruling powers (Gk. dunatoi) in Jerusalem and the Sicarii. The relatively strong guard that accompanied Paul when he was taken to Caesarea can perhaps be regarded as an indication that the power of the Zealot movement lay behind this plot” (p. 351). This suggestion has a lot of merit. That very thought crossed my mind as I was reading Luke’s account of it here in Acts 23:12-35. Josephus tells us that the Jewish leadership (chief priests and Sanhedrin) had a relationship to the Sicarii, who in turn were tightly connected with the Zealots. That appears to be the very kind of relationship in view here in Acts 23:12-22. A group of Jews conspired with the chief priests, elders, and the Sanhedrin. Luke does not identify this group of conspirators, but they are clearly following the pattern of the Sicarii that Josephus says so much about. We might wonder why the Sicarii and Zealots were so opposed to Christianity in general, and to Apostle Paul especially? It had something to do with the Gentiles. The disturbance in Caesarea only one year before Paul was arrested and imprisoned in Caesarea, had further embittered the Zealots against the Gentiles, and pushed them closer to open rebellion against the Roman Gentile control of Judea. At the very time the Jews and Zealots were trying to rid themselves of Gentile influence and associations in Judea, the Christians (under the leadership of Paul especially) were bringing the Gentiles into the faith without circumcising them or coercing them to keep the Law. It therefore does not take much imagination to figure out why Paul was so unpopular in Judea and Galilee.
