Acts 4:1–22: Peter and John Before the Council
Passage
In the previous passage Peter and John healed a man who had been blind from birth. It was a notable miracle that got a lot of people talking, and gave Peter an opportunity to give a detailed sermon. In this passage we’re told that the number of believing men has now reached 5,000! Given that we were told in Acts 2:14–17 that there were 3,000 believers, it means that thousands more believers have been added after this sermon. I hesitate to be more precise than that because:
- I don’t know how many believers were added in between these two events, and
- Acts 2 says that “three thousand souls” were added to the believers, whereas this passage says that “the number of men came to be about five thousand,” so I don’t know if Acts is saying “men” to mean “people,” or if Acts 4 is saying that there are now “5,000 men plus everyone else.”
The ESV Study Bible notes take the latter view, that Luke is saying literally 5,000 men, meaning that the total number of believers would be something like 10,000. Again, though, I don’t know if believers were added in between these two sermons, or if it was 3,000 people believing after the first sermon and 7,000 more after this one. Either way, a lot of people hear this sermon from Peter, and believe in the name of Jesus. Thousands. I’m not surprised when people look back fondly on the book of Acts and wish that we could see that kind of growth in the Church again, with thousands of souls being added daily.
Given these large numbers it shouldn’t be a surprise that the religious leaders are not happy about all of this talk about Jesus—the man they’d had crucified not long before! Verses 1–2 tell us that “the priests and the captain of the temple and the Sadducees” come to grab Peter and John, and that they are “greatly annoyed” that they’re “proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead.”
By the time this happens it’s the end of the day, however, so Peter and John are just held in custody until the next day, at which point the religious leaders confront them. (It should be noted that these are the same people who tried Jesus!) Their question for Peter and John is very simple:
And when they had set them in the midst, they inquired, “By what power or by what name did you do this?” (verse 7)
In response, Peter gives another mini sermon:
Then Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said to them, “Rulers of the people and elders, if we are being examined today concerning a good deed done to a crippled man, by what means this man has been healed, let it be known to all of you and to all the people of Israel that by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead—by him this man is standing before you well. This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (verses 8–12)
The religious leaders are astonished by this, because Peter and John are uneducated men and yet they’re so bold! They also recognize that Peter and John had been with Jesus, which seems obvious (given that Peter can’t stop talking about Him), but the ESV Study Bible notes have an interesting point on this:
It is impossible to imagine how much the disciples would have learned from spending three years in close association with the Son of God living on earth, listening to him teach, hearing him pray, and watching him interact with the most difficult challenges. They knew Jesus, and in knowing him they knew much more than all the learned scribes of the Sanhedrin.
And it’s true, there were occasions in the Gospels where people were amazed that Jesus taught with such authority—it seems his disciples are now carrying on with that same authority, even after Jesus’ crucifixion!
So the religious leaders have a bit of a problem: they want to get Jesus’ disciples to stop talking about Him, and don’t want His group of followers to keep growing, but they can’t really say anything against Peter and John because the guy they healed is standing right there, so nobody can deny the miracle that’s happened. So they come to what I imagine they viewed as a compromise: they tell Peter and John to stop speaking or teaching in the name of Jesus. (I say “compromise” because there’s no mention of a punishment or anything; they’ll let Peter and John go, if they just promise to stop teaching in Jesus’ name.)
But Peter and John answered them, “Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.” (verses 19–20)
If I’m correct in reading the religious leaders’ response as a compromise, Peter and John’s response is no, we’re not going to compromise! However, the religious leaders seem to feel their hands are tied because the people are all praising God for what has happened—and the man who was healed is over 40, which means he’s clearly able to speak for himself!—so they simply threaten Peter and John (we’re not told what the threat is), and let them go.
Thoughts
I know I’ve mentioned this a number of times, but at this point the believers in Jesus still seem to view themselves as being Jewish; when Peter and John are questioned by the religious leaders I don’t see them saying that the Jewish religious leaders no longer have authority, or that the followers of Jesus are no longer Jewish. Things have definitely changed, but there’s every indication that the initial believers in Acts view Christianity (which isn’t yet being called that) as an extension of God’s existing relationship with His people, not as something completely different1.
In fact, at this point I think the vast majority of believers are still Jewish; the early Church hasn’t yet started accumulating large numbers of non-Jewish believers. (Stay tuned!)
Peter and John
I’ve mentioned in recent posts about how Peter seems to be immediately taking up his role as leader of the nascent Church in the early chapters of Acts, and the fact that he’s definitely learned some lessons from Jesus as to how to do so. Ironically, Peter actually gives more of an answer to the High Priest in this passage than Jesus did at His own trial2!
What’s also interesting, however, is the fact that Acts keeps mentioning that John is there with Peter, but we’re never told anything John does or says. (Though this passage does say that both Peter and John respond to the religious authorities that they can’t agree to the religious leaders’ “compromise,” so he’s not completely silent in the pages of Acts.) Even though Peter is initially taking on a lot of the leadership responsibilities, John is obviously a critical part of the early Church—whatever his role might be, formally or informally.
It could very well be that Peter is the initial spokesperson of the Church while John is the “heart.” I’m not seeing a lot of evidence of that (at least not so far), so I don’t want to make strong claims or push that too far, but it is clear that John is important in the early Church, whatever his role, and I think about how overwhelmed John always seemed in the New Testament by the fact that Jesus loved him, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he was the emotional counterpart to Peter’s logical arguments.
And, again, how much of a change it is to be saying that about Peter, after his rashness in the Gospels!
The Sadducees
Just a reminder about who the Sadducees are: this was a sect of Judaism that only followed the “books of the law,” or the “books of Moses,” whatever you want to call them—Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy—and, as comes up from time to time in the New Testament, didn’t believe in a resurrection. So it’s not surprising at all that they are “annoyed” at Peter and John “proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection from the dead.”
Are these the same Sadducees who argued with Jesus about the resurrection (see Luke 20 for example)? I don’t know, but regardless, Peter and John now preaching about resurrection from the dead—and, in fact, making the foundation of all of their teachings the fact that their leader, Jesus, was himself raised from the dead, so it’s not just some side point—is going to be a problem for them.
You could read verses 19–20—“Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”—as rejecting the religious leaders’ authority; I don’t read it that way. I think this is more of a specific disagreement on a particular point, rather than a rejection of the entire Jewish leadership. I would understand if others read more strongly than I do, but we’ll see the early Church continuing to interact with the Jewish religious authorities for quite a while in the book of Acts, so I don’t see them as splitting away from Judaism quite yet. Again: this took place at the temple, because the early disciples were still going there, and still worshipping God, probably in much the same way they’d already been doing for thousands of years. ↩︎
To be clear, in case it’s not obvious, I’m not trying to claim Peter did a better job at his trial than Jesus did or anything silly like that. Jesus was purposely silent at his trial. It’s just interesting to now see Peter—the one who seemed so rash in the Gospels—giving the High Priest and other leaders a long, detailed answer after Jesus’ almost non-event of a trial. ↩︎
No comments:
Post a Comment