Acts 25:13-26:32

Notes

‘Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian’ (26:28, AV).

“If Felix is an example of someone who showed some interest in the gospel and then quickly backed off when he counted the cost of discipleship, Herod Agrippa II has long been thought of as one who seemed to get very close to becoming a Christian, only to fall at the very last hurdle. He is often portrayed as the one that got away—the ‘almost Christian’ of a host of gospel sermons! This appealing and dramatic perspective does not, however, hold up under closer scrutiny. It owes more to the English of 1611 and the Authorized Version than to the Greek of the New Testament. On a careful reading of the latter, Agrippa turns out to be not quite as much of an ‘almost’ Christian after all. What he actually said to Paul indicates a man who was quite decided as to his personal attitude to the Christian message.

“Furthermore, Agrippa is not primarily significant for his personal unwillingness to trust in Jesus Christ. Many individuals in the New Testament record exemplify the unbelieving response to the gospel. What marks out Agrippa is not so much what he did, as who he was. He was one of the leading figures in the Jewish community. There is, accordingly, a corporate dimension to his unbelief. Indeed, his response to Paul’s evangelistic witness stands as a kind of ratification of the rejection of the gospel by the Jewish establishment of the time. Agrippa’s turning away from Christ is emblematic of the hardening opposition to the gospel of the mainstream of Judaism. Because of this, the gospel was thereafter sent to the Gentiles as the primary focus of the evangelization of the world.

“The state of Agrippa’s individual religious experience, then, must be viewed in the context of this broader reality. He was the reigning Jewish monarch at the time of the destruction of the temple in A. D. 70 and as such he presided over the last days of the Old Testament order. Together with the high priests, he represented the blindness of the Jewish establishment to their own Messianic hope, as that was fulfilled in Jesus of Nazareth. Agrippa was, so to speak, a nail—one of many, certainly—in the coffin of the apostate church of the Old Testament age. In his encounter with Paul he drove his nail home. Within a decade the Old Testament church disappeared for ever. What is left in modern Judaism is a cultic memory of the Pharisaic tradition of New Testament times.”

Gordon J. Keddie, You Are My Witnesses: The Message of the Acts of the Apostles, Welwyn Commentary Series (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2000), 302–303.