Acts 4:1
¶ And as they spake unto the people, the
priests, and the captain of the temple, and the Sadducees, came upon them,
2 Being grieved that they taught the
people, and preached through Jesus the resurrection from the dead. 3 And they laid hands on them, and put them
in hold unto the next day: for it was now eventide. 4 Howbeit many of them which heard the word
believed; and the number of the men was about five thousand.
God uses Peter’s preaching to bring great numbers into the early
church. The religious authorities cannot stand what they view as seditious
behavior so they arrest the Apostles. There are a couple of English words used
in the Bible for a place where people were confined for various reasons. Here,
we have hold. Prison and ward are also used elsewhere.
It is interesting to note that the Sadducees were part of this
group that made the arrest.
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in 3:15 Peter referred to Christ’s resurrection which would have seriously
perturbed this sect of the Jews. Josephus, the Jewish general turncoat who
worked for the Romans and wrote histories of the Jews claimed that they
believed that the soul could die, that there was no afterlife, that there were
no rewards or penalties after death, and that only the written law was valid.
They were composed of the upper class and educated elite who oversaw the temple
operations and shared with the Roman upper class a denial of the reality of the
supernatural. They did, apparently, believe in God but were more political and
worldly than the more conservative Pharisees, and they were composed of a
ruling class that expected God’s benefits and prosperity now, in this life, and
denied even His intervention in history, sources say. They would have been
terrified of anything that threatened their position under Roman authority.
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