Acts 24:17Meaning & Commentary from the Church Fathers

Why did you return? Why did you come? He says, to pray and “to bring alms.” This is not the deed of a disturber. Then follows the reason for his arrival. “I came,” he says, “to bring alms to my nation and offerings,” and this “after many years.” How, then, could he be stirring up those for whom he made so distant a journey in order to bring alms?

Could he not have distributed what he had received from others in other lands and in the newly founded churches, which he instructed in his faith? But he was eager to give to the poor people of the holy places, who had left their possessions and turned with their whole heart to the service of the Lord.

The defensive speech of the Apostle Paul had a stronger effect on the procurator. Felix dismissed the accusers, promising to reconsider the case when the tribune Lysias came. Until then he granted the prisoner Paul even greater freedom than he had enjoyed before. He ordered the centurion assigned to him not to restrain him, and not to forbid any of his own people to serve him or come to him (vv. 10-23).

Before this he had not been in Jerusalem for five years. When he returned with alms for the poor of his people and with offerings for the temple, the Jews found him in the temple, where he was peacefully purifying himself according to the law. He was innocent of the riot that followed. It had been stirred up by certain Asian Jews, who ought to have been present as witnesses. Their absence proved the weakness of the accusation against him.

Then the apostle defends himself against the last accusation, that he supposedly attempted to defile the temple. To this he adds a few words again refuting the accusation that he is a stirrer of sedition among the Jews.

“After many years.” Probably about four years had passed since his last visit to Jerusalem, which was, however, very brief (Acts 18:22). Paul could say that he came to Jerusalem after many, comparatively speaking, years.

The purpose of this last arrival in Jerusalem was to bring alms and offerings to his people from the Gentile Christians, and to worship in the temple of the true God by offering sacrifice to Him.

This was not a seditious purpose, but a religious and charitable one.

Defining the essence of life in Christ, the Apostle Paul says that he strove always to have a pure conscience, which he is presumed to have had; see Acts 23:1.

At the same time he points to one form of his virtue, namely beneficence, and specifically toward his own people.

Thus his whole life and the activity of his last days are living witnesses. He is not a stirrer of the people, nor their plague, but a healer, nourisher, and benefactor.

He inclined to beneficence even those among whom he lived in a distant foreign land.

“What a contrast between Paul’s patriotic love for his people and the malicious slander of his enemies against him. The apostle says ‘my people’ because the alms came from the Greek and Macedonian Churches (see Rom 15:25-26).