Paul refused to believe this,but as soon as he had set foot in the Temple,he was recognised and a quickly gathering crowd threatened to lynch him.
The Roman troops,however,came to his rescue and took him to the castle.
They did not know exactly what to do with him.At first they thought that he was a revolutionary agitator,come from Egypt to Judaea to stir up trouble.But when Paul proved that he was a Roman citizen,they hastily offered their apologies and removed the handcuffs which had been placed upon him as a matter of precaution.
Lysias,the commander of the garrison in Jerusalem,found himself in the same predicament as Pilate a few years before.
He had no reason to proceed against Paul,but it was his duty to maintain order.
He allowed Paul to be brought before the Great Council and once more the town was on the verge of civil war.
The Pharisees and the Sadducees had long since repented of their hasty coalition brought about for the purpose of killing their common enemy Jesus and they had engaged in a series of bitter quarrels which forever kept the people of Jerusalem in a turmoil of religious excitement.
Under those circumstances it was impossible for Paul to expect a fair trial and Lysias wisely removed him to the castle where he was safe from the mob.
And then,as soon as it could be done without attracting too much public attention,he sent Paul to Caesarea where the procurator resided.
Paul remained more than two years in Caesarea and during that time enjoyed almost complete liberty.
But he grew tired of the endless accusations made against him by the members of the Sanhedrin and finally he asked that he be taken to Rome and allowed to explain his case to the Emperor,as was his good right as a Roman citizen.
In the fall of the year 60,Paul left for Rome.
It was a most disastrous voyage.
The ship which carried the apostle was shipwrecked and thrown upon the rocks of the island of Malta.
After three months’delay another vessel took Paul and his companions to the Italian mainland and in the year 61,Paul reached the city of Rome.
Here too it seems that he enjoyed a great deal of freedom.The Romans really had nothing against him.They simply did not want him to be in Jerusalem where his presence might have caused a riot.They were not interested in Jewish theology and certainly did not mean to try a man for crimes which were not recognised by their own courts.
Now that he was no longer a menace to the safety of the state,he was allowed to come and go at will and he made the best of this unexpected opportunity.
He rented a quiet room in one of the poorer quarters and once more turned missionary.
His courage during these last years was sublime.He was an old man,almost broken by the hardships of the past twenty years.But the jail sentences,the scourgings,the stoning (which he had received once with almost fatal results at the hands of his own compatriots),the endless journeys on ship and on foot and on horseback,the hunger and the thirst,all counted for nothing compared to the opportunity of explaining the ideals of Jesus personally to the capital of the civilised world.
How long he continued to preach or what became of him finally we do not know.
In the year 64there occurred one of those senseless anti-Christian outbreaks which were soon to be very popular.The Emperor Nero encouraged the mob when they started out to plunder and murder all those who belonged to the new faith.
Paul seems to have been one of the victims of this pogrom.
After that day we never hear his name mentioned again.
But the modern church stands as a monument to his genius.
Paul was the bridge which led from Galilee to Rome.He saved Christianity from degenerating into another little Jewish sect.
He made it the religion of an entire world.