1. Paul looked straight at the council members and said, “My friends, to this day I have served God with a clear conscience!”
2. Then Ananias the high priest ordered the men standing beside Paul to hit him on the mouth.
3. Paul turned to the high priest and said, “You whitewashed wall! God will hit you. You sit there to judge me by the Law of Moses. But at the same time you order men to break the Law by hitting me.”
4. The men standing beside Paul asked, “Don't you know you are insulting God's high priest?”
5. Paul replied, “Oh! I didn't know he was the high priest. The Scriptures do tell us not to speak evil about a leader of our people.”
6. When Paul saw that some of the council members were Sadducees and others were Pharisees, he shouted, “My friends, I am a Pharisee and the son of a Pharisee. I am on trial simply because I believe that the dead will be raised to life.”
7. As soon as Paul said this, the Pharisees and the Sadducees got into a big argument, and the council members started taking sides.
8. The Sadducees do not believe in angels or spirits or that the dead will rise to life. But the Pharisees believe in all these,
9. and so there was a lot of shouting. Some of the teachers of the Law of Moses were Pharisees. Finally, they became angry and said, “We don't find anything wrong with this man. Perhaps a spirit or an angel really did speak to him.”