Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 9:13

"But Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard from many of this man, how much evil he did to thy saints at Jerusalem:" — Acts 9:13 (ASV)

Lord, I have heard from many about this man.—These words are of interest as showing both the duration and the character of the persecution in which Saul had been the leader. The report of it had spread far and wide. The refugees at Damascus told of the sufferings of the brothers in Jerusalem.

Your saints in Jerusalem.—This is noticeable as the first application of the term “saints” to the disciples. The primary idea of the word was that of people who consecrated themselves and led, in the strictest sense of the word, a devout life. A term with a similar meaning had been adopted by the more religious Jews in the time of the Maccabees.

The Chasidim, or Saints (the word occurs in Psalms 16:3), were those who banded themselves together to resist the inroads of heathenism under Antiochus Epiphanes.

They appear in the books of Maccabees under the title of Assideans . The more distinctive name of Pharisees (Separatists), which came to be attached to the more zealous Chasidim, practically superseded this. Then, either by the disciples themselves or by friendly outsiders, the Greek equivalent of the old Hebrew word—and probably, therefore, in Palestine, the Aramaic form of the word itself—was revived to describe the devout members of the new society.

The fact that their Master had been conspicuously the Holy One of God (the same adjective is used of Him in the quotations from Psalms 16:10, in Acts 2:27; Acts 13:35) made it natural that the term “saints” should be extended to His followers. This was just as He had been spoken of as the Just One (Acts 3:14; Acts 7:52), though that name was also applied, in its Greek form, to James the brother of the Lord, and, in its Latin form of Justus, to the three so named in Acts 1:23; Acts 18:7; Colossians 4:11.

It is significant that its first appearance in the New Testament should be as used by the man who was sent to be St. Paul’s instructor, and that it should afterwards have been employed so frequently by the Apostle himself (Romans 1:7; Romans 15:25; 1 Corinthians 1:2; 1 Corinthians 6:1–2; 2 Corinthians 1:1; Ephesians 1:1; Philippians 1:1, and elsewhere). The “devout man according to the Law,” may well have been among the Chasidim even prior to his conversion to the faith of Christ.

The term also appears in inscriptions from the Catacombs in the Museum of the Collegio Romano at Rome: “N. or M. rests here with the Saints.” This usage, however, is probably in the later sense, referring to martyrs and others of distinguished holiness.