Acts 5:36

πρὸ γὰρ τούτων τῶν ἡμερῶν : Gamaliel appeals to the experience of the past the phrase is placed first with emphasis, cf. Acts 21:38; on St. Luke's fondness for phrases with ἡμέρα see above, and Friedrich, pp. 9, 89. But whilst Gamaliel appeals to the past, his appeal is not to a remote but to a near past which was still fresh in the memories of his generation, perhaps because, as St. Chrysostom urges, such recent examples μάλιστα πρὸς πίστιν ἦσαν ἰσχυρά. ἀνέστη, cf. Acts 7:18, like the Hebrew קוּם, and so constantly in LXX, Exodus 1:8; Deuteronomy 13:1; Deuteronomy 34:10; Judges 2:10; Judges 4:9; Judges 5:7, etc. Θεῦδας : St. Luke evidently places Theudas before Judas. But a difficulty arises from the fact that the only Theudas of this period known to us is placed by Josephus in the reign of Claudius, about the year 44, 45. He gave himself out as a false prophet, gathered round him “a great part of the people,” and persuaded them to follow him to the Jordan with a promise that its waters should miraculously divide before him as in the days of Moses. But the Roman procurator, Cuspius Fadus, sent a troop of horse to meet him, some of his followers were slain, others taken captive, whilst he himself was made prisoner and beheaded, and his head sent to Jerusalem, Jos., Ant., xxx., 5, 1. But a serious chronological discrepancy must be faced if the Theudas of Josephus is the Theudas of St. Luke. Gamaliel speaks of a Theudas who arose before the days of the enrolment, R.V., which marked the attempt of Judas, i.e., about 6 7 A.D. But are they the same? As early as the days of Origen their identity was denied (c. Cels., i., 57), see “Acts,” B.D. 2, Bishop Lightfoot, p. 40, and in comparing the two accounts in Josephus and Acts there is no close resemblance beyond the name, see Nösgen, in loco, and Belser, Theol. Quartalschrift, i., p. 70 (1896). St. Luke speaks definitely of 400 followers; Josephus evidently considers that the pretender was much more successful, so far as numbers were concerned, for he writes: πείθει τὸν πλεῖστον ὄχλον. These and similar discrepancies are also well insisted upon by Zahn in his recent Introduction, ii., 416, 417 (1899), and his own conclusion is that only such ordinary words are common to the two accounts as Luke, ἀνῃρέθη; Jos., ἀνεῖλε; Luke, ἐπείθοντο; Jos., ἔπειθε; and that we cannot get beyond the bounds of possibility that the two authors refer to the same fact (on Zahn's criticism of Krenkel's view of the dependence of Luke on Josephus in the narrative, see u. s.). In referring to the appearance of the many false Messiahs, such as the Theudas of Josephus, Ant., xx., 5, 1, Dr. Edersheim, Sketches of Jewish Social Life, p. 66, remarks: “Of course this could not have been the Theudas of Acts 5:36-37, but both the name and the movement were not solitary in Israel at the time”; see also Ramsay, Was Christ born in Bethlehem? p. 259. And no testimony could be stronger than that of Josephus himself to the fact that at the time of the Advent Judæa was full of tumults and seditions and pretenders of all kinds, Ant., xvii., 10, 4, 8; B. J., ii., 4, 1. The view has been maintained by many commentators that the Theudas of Josephus may reasonably be supposed to be one of the many false teachers and leaders mentioned by the Jewish historian and not always by name, who pandered to the feverish hopes of the people and gave themselves out as of kingly rank (so recently Belser, Felten, Page, Plumptre, Knabenbauer). The name Theudas contracted from Theodorus may not have been so common as that of Simon or Judas (although on the other hand, see Nösgen, Apostelgeschichte, p. 147) “Josephus describes four men bearing the name of Simon within forty years, and three that of Judas within ten years, all of whom were instigators of rebellion” but it was the Greek equivalent to several familiar Hebrew names, e.g., Jonathan, Matthias; and Bishop Lightfoot allows that there is something to be said for Wieseler's suggestion that on the ground of the name the Theudas here may be identified with Matthias, the son of Margalothus, an insurgent in the time of Herod, prominent in the pages of Josephus, Ant., xvii., 6, 2 (see also Zöckler on the whole question, Apostelgeschichte, p. 197, 2nd edit.). We must admit the objection of Wendt that this and other identifications of names and persons cannot be proved (and some of them certainly are very precarious, as Alford pointed out), but we cannot suppose that St. Luke could have made the gross blunder attributed to him in the face of his usual accuracy (see Blass, Acta Apostolorum, p. 90), or endorse with Schürer what he calls “the slight authority of the Acts in such matters” (Jewish People, div. i., vol. ii., p. 169). If it is hardly possible that Josephus can have been mistaken, although some writers have held that it is by no means impossible that even here he may have been (cf. Alford, Rendall, Belser, and compare the remarks of Zahn, ubi supra), we may at least claim the same probability of freedom from error for St. Luke, “temporum bene memorem se scriptor monstrat: quo minus est probabile eum de Theuda tam graviter errasse quam plerique putant” (Blass), and see the recent remarks of Ramsay, Was Christ born at Bethlehem ? p. 252 ff. It cannot be said that some recent attempts at a solution of the difficulty are very promising; for whilst H. Holtzmann severely blames Blass for maintaining that some Christian had interpolated the name Theudas in the text of Josephus (see Blass, in loco, and p. xvi., edit. min.), he himself is prepared to endorse the view recently maintained amongst others by Clemen that the writer of Acts in his mention of Theudas gives us a vague but yet recognisable recollection of Jos., Ant., xx., 5, 1; see in loco and Theol. Literaturzeitung, 3, 1896, and 13, 1897. B. Weiss thinks that the notorious difficulty may easily be got rid of by supposing that the reviser inserted the example of Theudas in the wrong place, Einleitung in das N. T., p. 574. λέγων εἶναί τινα ἑαυτόν : of consequence, really “somebody,” cf. Acts 8:9 (and R.V.); “ein grosser Mann,” Blass, Grammatik des N. G., p. 76; so we have its opposite, οὐδείς, cf. instances in Wetstein in classical Greek; so in Latin quidam, aliquis, Juvenal, i., 74; Cicero, ad Atticum, iii., 15; and cf. also 1 Corinthians 3:7; Galatians 2:6; Galatians 6:3; Viteau, Le Grec du N. T., p. 148 (1893). And yet the jealous eye of the Pharisees was blind to the difference between such a man as Theudas, whom Gamaliel so contemptuously described, and the Apostles who sought not their own honour (Nösgen); cf. Vulgate, “dicens se esse aliquem,” so Rhem. and Wycl., “saying that he was somebody”. προσεκολλήθη : better reading προσεκλίθη, a word not found elsewhere in N.T., cf. 2Ma 14:24; and so also in LXX, cf. Psalms 39 (40):2, Symmachus; cf. Polyb., iv., 51, 5; so also πρόσκλισις; for its further use see Clem. Rom., Cor [185], xlvii., 4 ὡσεὶ (ὡς) τετρακοσίων, see above on “Theudas”. ἀνῃρέθη, see also on ἀναιρέω, Acts 5:33, often of violent death in Acts. The two clauses stand in sharp contrast the one emphasises the large number which joined Theudas, the other the fact that notwithstanding he was slain; cf. Acts 4:10. διελύθησαν κ. τ. λ.: nowhere else in N.T., but its use is quite classical, cf. Thuc., ii., 12; Xen., Cyr., v., 5, 43; Polyb., iv., 2. Blass remarks that the whole phrase “apte de secta quæ paullatim dilabitur, minus apte de multitudine per vim disjecta”. ἐγένοντο εἰς οὐδέν : phrase only here in N.T. (cf. Acts 19:27), but see in LXX, Job 24:25; Isaiah 40:17, Wis 3:17; Wisdom 20:16. γίνομαι εἰς in LXX and also in classics; in N.T. cf. Luke 13:19; Luke 20:17; Acts 4:11, and cf. 1 Thessalonians 3:5. In the first passage it is Hebraistic; in the passage before us and in 1 Thess. the phrases are quite possibly Greek, cf. especially Simcox, Language of the N. T., p. 143. The phrase is more frequent in St. Luke's writings than in any other books of the N.T., except the Apocalypse.

[185] Corinth, Corinthian or Corinthians.