NOTES for Act 18:14-15

Local representatives of Roman authority responded in different ways to accusations against Paul himself and other Christians. Sometimes they took the side of the orthodox Jews, and sometimes they preferred not to get involved in the situation, as happened in Achaia. This is understandable: the authorities had no formal legal grounds for intervention; the grounds could only be political, and this had already become clear in the story of Pilate, who confirmed the death sentence against Jesus for purely political reasons.

In Achaia, however, everything happened differently. The local proconsul, Gallio, chose to remain faithful to Roman laws and Roman ideas of fairness and justice. He told the Jews who had come to him with a complaint directly that their complaint concerned only their internal affairs and disputes, and that Roman law had not been violated in this case. Therefore the authorities had no reason to interfere in this conflict.

The proconsul's mention of some "dispute about names" is interesting. In the diaspora communities, Paul was evidently speaking about the same thing all the apostles spoke about in Judea: the name of Jesus, by calling on which one can be saved. Even then in Judea this preaching caused at least bewilderment and opposition from the Sanhedrin. Now, in the diaspora, disputes about the name had evidently become an echo of those disputes in Judea that had led to sanctions by the local religious authorities. But in any case these disputes did not concern the Roman authorities - that is what the proconsul believed.

This does not mean that the Roman authorities allowed complete freedom of religious life. Any religious communities had to be officially registered, and registration was permitted only for representatives of those religions considered "traditional" in the Roman Empire (properly Roman cults and the traditional cults of peoples conquered by Rome). But the Synagogue was officially registered, Judaism was considered a traditional religion, and the authorities had no legal grounds to interfere in an intra-community dispute. This is the sense in which the proconsul answers the Jews who came to him with a complaint.

It would seem to be a normal answer, but... from that same Pilate, for example, no such normal answer could be heard. Of course, Achaia is not Jerusalem, the situation there was far less tense, and the scale of the conflict was incomparable. But the choice always remains with the person.

Of course, here the issue is not yet the choice of a Christian, not the choice between the Kingdom and the evil in which the world lies. But any choice between truth, as a person understands it, and falsehood either brings a person closer to the Kingdom or moves him away from the Kingdom, regardless of what the person himself thinks about it, and even regardless of whether he knows about the Kingdom or thinks about God. Spiritual laws are the same for everyone, and choice is always a spiritual phenomenon, just like the action that follows it.