Acts 5 Study Notes

5:1-2 Not everyone shared in Joseph’s liberality. Ananias and his wife Sapphira sold a piece of property but kept back part of the sale price despite claiming otherwise (v. 8).

5:3-4 Ananias and Sapphira assumed they were merely lying to men (the apostles), but in reality they had lied to the Holy Spirit who is ever-present in the church. Peter’s wording indicates that the Holy Spirit is God. Peter’s question (wasn’t it at your disposal?) implies that Ananias and Sapphira would have been justified to sell the land and give only a portion to the church. Their sin lay in their deception and their desire to win praise.

5:5-9 The deception of Ananias and Sapphira, and in particular Sapphira’s lie to Peter, was a test of the Spirit of the Lord. This is a powerful indication of the Spirit’s role in the church and church leadership; Peter was a mere man, but he was God’s man to lead this fellowship of believers.

5:11 On fear as a response to the workings of God, see v. 5; 2:43; 9:31; 19:17.

5:12 Undaunted by their previous arrest at the temple (4:3), the apostles continued to perform signs and wonders among the people they encountered in Solomon’s Colonnade.

5:13-14 There is an apparent contradiction between these two verses. It seems that prior to the incident with Ananias and Sapphira many nonbelievers had been attracted to the Christian group because of the signs and wonders. That was now no longer the case. Nevertheless, many genuine believers were still joining them.

5:15-16 The people came to believe that there was something magical about Peter and that even his shadow would be enough to heal them. There are a number of places in the NT, including Acts, where God healed people through surprising means. Besides Peter’s shadow, these included the hem of Jesus’s robe (Lk 8:44) as well as facecloths and aprons that the apostle Paul had touched (Ac 19:12). There was, of course, nothing special about these items; rather, it was the power of God working through the messengers with whom the objects were associated.

5:17-18 The high priest and all who were with him opposed the spread of Christianity not merely because they didn’t believe in Jesus as Messiah, but because they were filled with jealousy at the following that was building around him daily as the apostles preached and performed miracles.

5:19-20 Having been arrested again for their ministry in Jesus’s name (v. 18), the apostles were set free by an angel of the Lord in such a way that aroused no attention. Some speculate that they were transported directly from the jail to the temple, but the fact that the angel opened the doors of the jail and told the apostles to Go and stand in the temple suggests otherwise. See 12:6-10 and note there for a similar episode.

5:21a Once they were freed, we might expect the apostles to flee Jerusalem. Instead, they went to the temple at daybreak and began to do the very thing that had gotten them in trouble in the first place: teach about Jesus.

5:21b-24 The Sanhedrin convened in the morning, intent on taking decisive action to halt the growth of the Christian faith. That the servants found the jail securely locked and the guards standing duty proves that the jailbreak was both miraculous and secretive.

5:25-26 The temple police were afraid the people might stone them because Jerusalem was responding positively to the apostles. Meanwhile, the Jewish leaders saw their authority slipping away.

5:27-28 The Jewish leaders feared that the people would hold them responsible for Jesus’s death. They were more concerned about maintaining their authority than embracing the truth.

5:29 Christians should obey the law of the land, but when human law conflicts with God’s law, we must obey God rather than people.

5:30-32 If anything, Peter stepped up the pressure on the Sanhedrin (and endangered himself and the others more) by declaring that they had murdered Jesus, whom God exalted . . . to his right hand as ruler and Savior. Peter and the other apostles knew this to be true because they were witnesses of this, as was the Holy Spirit.

5:33-34 If the Jewish leaders had been willing to kill Jesus, much more were they prepared to kill the apostles, whose stubborn testimony was serving to prolong the Jesus controversy. But Gamaliel wisely cooled their rage. This was Gamaliel I, the teacher of Paul the apostle (22:3). It is uncertain whether he was the successor to the great rabbinic teacher Hillel or whether he founded his own school. In either case, he became a major rabbinic teacher. His conciliatory stance toward the apostles is consistent with what is known of his temperate attitude elsewhere.

5:35-36 Josephus, the Jewish historian, reported that many revolts against Roman rule occurred during the time of Jesus—some of them even having messianic overtones. He mentions a person named Theudas, who came after Judas the Galilean (v. 37). This is probably not the same person as the Theudas referred to here.

5:37 Judas the Galilean, or Judas of Gamala, rebelled against the census that Quirinius took in AD 6. He was mentioned by Josephus as teaching that the Israelites were not to give tribute to pagan rulers. His revolt ended in defeat.

5:38-39 Gamaliel’s advice reflected the Pharisees’ belief that if God has ordained something, it will come to pass. Thus Gamaliel felt it was prudent for the Sanhedrin to step back and see what God would do with the Christian movement.

5:40-42 Some people believe that suffering and hardships are signs that we are not in God’s will. Contrast this with the apostles, who, after being flogged, went out of the presence of the Sanhedrin, rejoicing that they had been considered worthy to be treated shamefully on Christ’s behalf.