Illustrated New TestamentActs 28

Out of the heat; driven out by the heat.

A murderer. They of course considered all the prisoners as convicts; and this occurrence led them to suppose that Paul had been guilty of some peculiarly atrocious crime.

The chief man of the island; probably a Roman magistrate stationed there.

Whose sign was Castor and Pollux; that is, was ornamented with figures of Castor and Pollux, two demigods much celebrated in those days among seamen.

Syracuse; a celebrated city on the Island of Sicily.

Puteoli; on the coast of Italy.

Where we found brethren. This shows how extensively the Christian religion had already been disseminated.

The hope of Israel. The Messiah was the hope of Israel. It was Paul's belief in Jesus as the Messiah which had awakened the hostility of the Jews.—This chain; the chain by which he was bound to the soldier who kept him, according to the custom of guarding such prisoners at Rome.

This sect; the sect of Christians. The history of the doings of the apostles here abruptly terminates, and it has been supposed by some, that Luke, who accompanied Paul to Rome at this time, wrote this history there, bringing the narrative down to the time when he wrote, and that the Theophilus whom he mentions in his introduction, was a Roman. The supposition that he was at Rome, or that he had Roman readers particularly in mind when writing, is somewhat confirmed by the minute allusions to the geography of the vicinity of the city, in the fifteenth verse of the last chapter.