Acts 23:6

Acts 23:6. But when Paul perceived that the one part were Sadducees, and the other Pharisees. The great council now for many years seems to have been divided roughly into two great parties, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. (See on the position held in Israel at this time by these two sects, Excursus at the end of the chapter.)

He cried out in the council, Men and brethren, I am a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee: of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question. The true reading here is ‘the son of Pharisees.' Paul's conduct in thus involving the Pharisees and Sadducees present in the Sanhedrim in a violent dispute, has been the theme of much controversy. The very praise lavished on what has been called ‘a strategic act' on the part of the apostle, raises doubts in the mind of the seeker after God, whether or no Paul's action here was right and wise. For instance, the celebrated Roman Catholic expositor Cornelius A. Lapide, builds on it the famous maxim, ‘The war of heretics is the peace of the Church.' He calls this the only method of maintaining the unity of the Church. Alford's words here are singularly happy: ‘Surely no defence of Paul for adopting this course is required, but our admiration is due to his skill and presence of mind. Nor need we hesitate to regard such skill as the fulfilment of the promise, that in such an hour the Spirit of Wisdom should suggest words to the accused, which the accuser should not be able to gainsay. All prospect of a fair trial was hopeless. He well knew, from past and present experience, that personal odium would bias his judges, and violence prevail over justice; he therefore uses in the cause of truth the maxim so often perverted to the cause of falsehood, Divide et impera.'

On considering Paul's words, ‘I am a Pharisee,' it must not be forgotten that after all, the great doctrine which distinguished the Pharisees of those days was their belief in the resurrection. It was this which really separated them from their rivals the Sadducees. The Pharisee teachers, it has been truly remarked, had given to this doctrine a prominence which it never had before. Many of their noblest members, even leaders, mainly on this account had been secret disciples of our Lord, such as Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathea, and possibly the Rabbi Gamaliel. Some seven or eight years before this time we know that already among the members of the Christian Church were many avowed Pharisees (see chap. Acts 15:5). The apostle really said, to use Plumptre's paraphrase of his words here: ‘I am a Pharisee; yes, I am one with you in all that is truest in your creed. I invite you to listen and see whether what I now proclaim to you is not the crown and completion of all your hopes and yearnings. Is not the resurrection of Jesus the one thing needed for a proof of that hope of the resurrection of the dead of which you and your fathers have been witnesses?'

There was a common ground on which Paul with the Christian teachers and the Pharisees met together, and the apostle longed to lead those who had already grasped a part of the truth yet higher into the regions of gospel light. The hope of the fathers fulfilled by the coming of Jesus the Messiah, and the resurrection of the dead sealed by the resurrection of Christ, these two themes were the groundwork of all Paul's preaching. We gather from the ‘Acts' and the inspired Epistles that the Christianity of the first days was founded on the fact of the resurrection of Christ (see 1 Corinthians 15:15-20, where the apostle presses home this argument with what we may dare to term a sublime temerity). Thus Paul in his words, ‘I am a Pharisee.... of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question,' took his standing on the same platform with his former friends and now jealous and relentless foes the Pharisees. My only crime, he urged with passionate earnestness, is that I preach with a strange success that great doctrine of the resurrection, the maintaining of which at all risks, in an unbelieving and faithless generation, is the reason of existence of the whole Pharisee sect. On that doctrine Paul as a Christian knew how to flash a new strong light, but the ‘teaching' itself for which he really suffered was only the teaching of the purest Pharisee school.