Acts 5:36 - Exposition

Giving himself out for boasting himself, A.V.; dispersed for scattered, A.V.; came for brought, A.V. Rose up Theudas . A very serious chronological difficulty arises hero. The only Theudas known to history is the one about whom Josephus writes ('Ant. Jud.,' Acts 20:5 ), quoted in full by Eusebius ('Ecclesiastes Hist.,' Ecclesiastes 2:11 ) as having pretended to be a prophet, having lured a number of people to follow him to the banks of the Jordan, by the assurance that he would part the waters of the river, and as having been pursued by order of Cuspius Fadus, the Procurator of Judaea, when numbers of his followers were slain and taken prisoners, and Theudas himself had his head cut off. But Fadus was procurator in the reign of Claudius Caesar, immediately after the death of King Agrippa, ten or twelve years after the time when Gamaliel was speaking, and about thirty years after the time at which Gamaliel places Theudas. Assuming St. Luke to be as accurate and correct here as he has been proved to be in other instances where his historical accuracy has been impugned, three ways present themselves of explaining the discrepancy. 1. Josephus may have misplaced the adventure of Theudas by some accidental error. Considering the vast number of Jewish insurrections from the death of Herod the Great to the destruction of Jerusalem, such a mistake is not very improbable. 2. There may have been two adventurers of the name of Theudas, one in the reign of Augustus Caesar, and the other in the reign of Claudius; and so both the historians may be right, and the apparent discrepancy may have no real existence (see Wordsworth, in loc .). 3. The person named Theudas by Gamaliel may be the same whom Josephus speaks of ('Bell. Jud.,' it. 4.2) by the common name of Simon, as gathering a band of robbers around him, and making himself king at Herod's death ('Sonntag,' cited by Meyer, etc.). But he was killed by Gratus, and the insurrection suppressed. A variety in this last mode has also been suggested (Kitto's 'Cyclopaedia'), viz. to understand Theudas to be an Aramaic form of Theodotus, and the equivalent Hebrew form of Theodotus to be היָתְתִםַ , Matthias, and so the person meant by Theudas to be a certain Matthias who with one Judas made an insurrection, when Herod the Great was dying, by tearing down the golden eagle which Herod had put over the great gate of the temple, and who was burnt alive with his companions, after defending his deed in a speech of great boldness and constancy ('Ant. Jud' 17.6). A consideration of these methods of explaining the apparent contradiction between the two historians shows that no certainty can without further light be arrived at. But it may be observed that it is quite impossible to suppose that any one so well informed and so accurate as St. Luke is could imagine that an event that he must have remembered perfectly, if it happened under the procuratorship of Fadus, had happened before the disturbances caused by Judas of Galilee, at least thirty years before. But it is most certain that Josephus's account of Theudas agrees better with Gamaliel's notice than that of either of the other persons suggested, irrespective of the identity of name. The first way of explaining the difficulty above proposed has, therefore, most probability in it. But some further corroboration of this explanation may be found in some of the details of Theudas's proceedings given by Josephus. He tells us that Theudes persuaded a great number of people to "collect all their possessions" and follow him to the banks of the Jordan, where he promised, like a second Elijah, to part the waters for them to pass over; that they did so, but that Fadus sent a troop of horse after them, who slew numbers of them, and amongst them their leader. Now, if this happened when the business of the census was beginning to be agitated, after the deposition of Archelaus (A.D. 6 or 7), all is plain. Theudas declaimed as a prophet against submitting to the census of their goods ordered by Augustus. The people were of the same mind. Theudas persuaded them that, if they brought all their goods to the banks of the Jordan, he would divide the stream and enable them to carry them over to the other side out of reach of the tax-gatherer. And so they made the attempt. But this was an act of rebellion against the Roman power, and a method of defeating the purpose of the census, which must be crushed at once. And so the people were pursued and slaughtered. But apart from the census of their goods, one sees no motive either for the attempt to carry away their property, or for the slaughter of an unarmed multitude by the Roman cavalry. So that the internal evidence is in favor of St. Luke's collocation of the incident, at the same time that his authority as a contemporary historian is much higher than that of Josephus. Still, one desiderates some more satisfactory proof of the error of Josephus, and some account of how he fell into it.