Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 11:28

"And there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the Spirit that there should be a great famine over all the world: which came to pass in the days of Claudius." — Acts 11:28 (ASV)

Here Luke uses the connective “in those days” just as he did at 1:15 and 6:1, to link parts of his narrative. Now he tells of certain “prophets” who “came down from Jerusalem to Antioch.” Among them was Agabus, with his dire prediction of impending famine in Jerusalem (cf. 21:10). The Jews believed that with the last of the writing prophets, the spirit of prophecy had ceased in Israel; but the coming Messianic Age would bring an outpouring of God’s Spirit, and prophecy would again flourish. The early Christians, having experienced the inauguration of the Messianic Age, not only proclaimed Jesus to be the Mosaic eschatological prophet (cf. 3:22; 7:37) but also saw prophecy as a living phenomenon within the church (cf. also 13:1; 15:32; 21:9–10) and ranked it among God’s gifts to his people next to that of being an apostle (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:28; Ephesians 4:11).

Agabus’s prediction was of a “severe famine” affecting “the entire Roman world,” which took place, Luke notes, during the reign of the emperor Claudius (A. D. 41–54). Although there is no record of a single famine that ravaged the whole empire in the time of Claudius, various Roman historians referred to a series of bad harvests and famine conditions during his reign. One of them, the Jewish historian Josephus, refers to famine relief sent from northern Mesopotamia to Jerusalem. 29–30 Similarly, the Christians at Antioch, in response to Agabus’s prophecy, decided to provide help for their fellow believers at Jerusalem, whose plight as a minority group within the nation would be particularly difficult at such a time. We are not given any details as to how the relief was collected, how it was administered, or when it was delivered. All we know from the text is that it was an expression of Christian concern by the Antioch church “for the brothers living in Judea” and was taken by Barnabas and Saul “to the elders” (i.e., the leaders) of the Jerusalem church. The “famine visit” of Barnabas and Saul to Jerusalem of 11:27–30 should probably be dated about A. D. 46. That date, even though tentative and general, presents commentators with their first real date for working out a Pauline chronology (cf. comments on the reign of Herod Agrippa I at 12:1–23, the Edict of Claudius at 18:2, and Gallio’s proconsulate at 18:12). But as to how we are to reconcile this date with what Paul tells us in his letters and how we are to fit it into an overall chronology depends largely on the answer to the conundrum of the relation of Paul’s two Jerusalem visits mentioned in Galatians to his three Jerusalem visits reported in Acts. While most accept the correlation of Gal 1:18– 20 with Ac 9:26–29 and count that as the first visit, many feel that Gal 2:1–10 should be identified with the Jerusalem Council of Ac 15. But this appears to make Ac 11:27–30 either a fabrication on Luke’s part or a doublet of the Ac 15 material placed here by Luke for his own purposes. The issues are complex and have far-reaching consequences. (See comments on Ac 15 in the context of 12:25–16:5.) Here it is sufficient to say that the simplest solution, one that provides the most satisfactory and convincing reconstruction and leaves the fewest loose ends, is that Gal 2:1–10 corresponds to the famine visit of Ac 11:27–30. On such an understanding, and taking the temporal conjunctions “then” of Gal 1:18 and 2:1 as referring back to Saul’s conversion (A. D. 33, allowing some flexibility in rounding off the years), his first visit to Jerusalem can be dated about 36, and his famine visit some fourteen years after his conversion about 46. On such a basis, the reference in Gal 2:2 to Saul’s having gone to Jerusalem “in response to a revelation” should probably be related to Agabus’s prophecy of Ac 11:28.