Acts 23:2Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

What then did the high priest do? He ought to have pitied Paul because, to please them, he had been unjustly bound. Instead, he grew still harsher and ordered him to be struck, as is clear from what follows: "The high priest Ananias commanded those who stood by him to strike him on the mouth." A fine deed, and a meek high priest. But see what their malice was like. "The high priest Ananias," the writer continues, "commanded those who stood by him to strike him on the mouth." Why do you strike him? What insulting thing did he say? O shamelessness, O audacity!

"Transgressing the law" means being guilty of lawlessness. It is as though he says: you are worthy of very many punishments. He calls him a whitewashed wall because Ananias assumed the bright appearance of a man who seemed to defend the law and judge according to the law. Yet his mind was full of lawlessness. Therefore Paul exposes in him the hypocritical outward appearance of devotion to the law.

They were already about to scourge Paul, in order to force from him a confession of the guilt that had provoked the riot. Then he declared of himself that he was a Roman citizen, and by this saved himself from torture.

After this, the tribune, in order to clarify his case, resolved to present him to the Sanhedrin. Here Paul showed himself a man who, by Christian meekness, knew how to subdue every agitation of feeling. With Christian prudence he knew how to use circumstances without harming the truth.

Although for a moment he allowed himself to be carried away by a feeling of righteous indignation and began to speak more sharply than he wished, he immediately restrained himself.

The high priest and at the same time president of the Sanhedrin, Ananias, son of Nebedeus, was high priest from 48 to 60. He considered Paul an open and most insolent opponent of God and His Law.

In his opinion, Paul not only did not himself fulfill the Law of God, but taught others to do the same. Therefore the apostle’s words that he had served God with an entirely good conscience must have seemed to him an insolent lie and vile hypocrisy.

For this reason they drove him into a rage, and he ordered those standing before the defendant, probably attendants of the Sanhedrin, to strike him on the mouth.

But this was a completely lawless act on the part of the high priest. It was a total violation of the order of the court and of the rights of the defendant, as defined by every law.

The Sanhedrin assembled, and the prisoner, the Apostle Paul, was brought in by Lysias. The presiding officer of the Sanhedrin was the high priest Ananias.

He was the same kind of arrogant, worldly, unbelieving Sadducee as the others from the viper’s house of Annas. Yet he surpassed them in cruelty and insatiable greed.

With greedy heartlessness and rapacity, he reduced the lower priests almost to starvation by depriving them of the tithes that belonged to them. In general he was such a plunderer that he sent his servants with clubs to the threshing floors to seize the tithes by force.

He held the office of high priest for a period unusually long in those troubled times, though it was interrupted by his absence. He was then sent as a prisoner to Rome to answer for his criminal actions.

The high priest Ananias, proud and coarse, ordered those standing before him, probably the attendants at the official sessions of the Sanhedrin, to strike Paul on the mouth. The apostle’s words seemed to him either hypocrisy, self-praise, or perhaps even blasphemy in the mouth of one whom he considered an obvious violator of the Law and defiler of the temple.

By blows on the speaker’s mouth, he wished to stop the continuation of such supposedly blasphemous speech.

This Ananias, who was then performing the office of high priest, was not merely titular, nor deposed and only so called, as there were many such at that time. He was the son of Nebedeus, the successor in this office of Joseph, son of Camydus, and the predecessor of Ishmael, son of Phiabi.

The Apostle Paul attempted to justify himself before the Sanhedrin by appealing to the purity of his good conscience. But the high priest Ananias, who had evidently foreseen Paul’s whole case earlier, ordered Paul to be struck on the mouth, as though that mouth had uttered something blasphemous.

Then Paul reminded him that one cannot punish without establishing guilt. At the same time he called him a whitewashed wall, having in mind his guilt in many things. Ananias, however, knew how to conceal this skillfully from many, though not from all.