Excerpt from Commentary on the Epistle to the Ephesians

Of the duration of this imprisonment, and of the occupation of the illustrious prisoner while it lasted, we learn from the concluding words of the Acts And Paul dwelt two whole years in his. Own hired house, and received all that came unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, no man forbidding him. As to the date of his arrival in Rome, and so that at which his two years of captivity began, we are to note that his departure from Cesarea occurred upon the arrival in that city of Porcius Festus in Felix's room as Procurator of J udea. This has been shown to be in the year A. D. 60 (wieseler, quoted by Rev. G. Lloyd Davies). In the autumn of that year those who were to conduct Paul to Rome, as a prisoner, sailed with him from Cesarea. In the spring of the following year, A. D. 61, he arrived in Rome, and the two years of his imprisonment began, closing, it is thought, in the spring of the year A. D. 63. At this point, our certain knowledge of him ceases, save that mention is made by writers such as Clemens, the disciple and com panion of Paul, by the Canon of Muratori, and by Eusebius, of his release from this imprisonment, his subsequent missionary journeys to the boundary of the West, and his martyrdom under Nero. It was during this latter period, supposed to be within the dates A. D. 63 and A. D. 68, that the two epistles to Timothy and the Epistle to Titus were written; the second to Timothy being last of all these productions of the Great Apostle. (see Hackett's Commentary on the Acts in this series, p.

These four epistles of the Captivity, with the study of one of which we are to be occupied in the pages following this introduction, derive from the circumstances under which they were written an individuality quite as marked as one discovers in their con tents. The author of them is not now, as in the case of so many other of these remark able productions, actively pursuing his missionary journey from city to city, or amidst the activities and anxieties of his daily ministry at Corinth or Athens or Philippi. Ive picture him in the hired lodgings at Rome, which he had been permitted to occupy, instead of any one of the prisons there, such as that which tradition assigns to him in his second imprisonment, and from which he went forth to his death. He enjoys, it is true, a measure of freedom not commonly allowed to prisoners, yet is in one way never permitted, by night or by day, to forget the fact of his real condition. The hand with which these letters were written wore, during the whole two years of his captivity, a chain, the other' end of whichlwas fastened to the left hand of the soldier who guarded him. This unwelcome attendance was never under any circumstances intermitted, and the fact of it lends genuine pathos to those places in his letter to the Ephesians, where, in speaking of himself as the prisoner of Jesus Christ, or, prisoner in the Lord, he uses the Greek word 6 Monroe, which means, one bound with a chain.

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