I am using the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on Acts 26-28.

    I want to make a couple of points about the defense Paul raised before King Agrippa and Governor Festus. As he had done previously with Governor Felix, Paul starts his defense by praising King Agrippa’s understanding of Jewish Laws and practices. Paul then relates his conversion story before getting into the heart of his argument for following Jesus. Which brings me to the main point I want to make about Paul’s argument for Christianity. Before I go into that I want to bring to your attention that we are in late November and I am only now getting to the end of the Book of Acts in reading through the Bible. The bulk of the year was spent reading the Old Testament and only a little over a month will be spent on the letters of the New Testament. The heart of Paul’s argument for Christianity was how the Old Testament Scriptures are fulfilled in Jesus. Throughout the Book of Acts, Luke repeatedly mentions that someone went through the Old Testament and showed how the prophets pointed to the events of Jesus’ life and His teachings. Here Paul did not even find it necessary to go through the evidence in Scripture for Jesus, King Agrippa interrupted him as he began to make his case, suggesting the King Agrippa already knew the arguments and that they did indeed make the case which Paul claimed for them. I believe this represents Luke’s primary hypothesis throughout the Book of Acts (and I suspect his unspoken reason for writing it): Christianity is not a new religion, rather it is the logical conclusion from Judaism. Luke tells us that Paul made a similar presentation when he spoke with the Jewish leaders in Rome.

    As I began reading Luke’s account of Paul’s journey to Rome the first thing that struck me were the details he included: details which lend credibility to his account. One could argue that those details may have been included in order to lead people to believe a story which Luke had made up. There are two problems with that theory. The first is that these details allow someone to readily prove Luke’s account false. He lists the names of people with whom his account can be checked. The second problem with that theory is that the idea of such details being necessary to believe a story is relatively modern. The idea of recounting events as they happened, rather than adjusted so as to more readily make the point o=you wanted to make, was fairly novel at the time Luke wrote. As a matter of fact, Luke may be the first writer to do so. Relative to the first point, there was a time when historians argued that Luke’s accounts must be fabricated because his details did not match what the historians knew about the people, places, and events he mentions. More recently, it has been discovered that Luke’s account was more accurate than what those historians believed to be true.