Acts 25:11-19

¹¹If I did something bad, like something that the law says to the kill people for, I will let them kill me. I will not ask them to let me go free. But I didn’t do anything bad like that. So nobody can give me to this mob and let them kill me. No. Instead of that, I ask you to send me to the biggest Roman boss, called Caesar. I’m asking you to let him judge me in his big city, Rome.”

¹²Festus talked with his friends there. They were the men that helped him think about things. Then Festus said to Paul, “All right. You want me to send you to Caesar, and I will do that. I’ll send you to Caesar, and he can judge you there in Rome.”

¹³After a few days, the big boss of another country came to Caesarea. He was called Agrippa. His young sister, called Bernice, came with him. They came to say hello to Festus, and to say, “We are happy for you to be the new governor of this country.”

¹⁴While they were there at Caesarea, Festus told that big boss about Paul. He said, “Felix left a prisoner in jail here. He’s a different kind of man.

¹⁵You see, I went to Jerusalem and the leaders of the Jewish ceremonies, and the other Jewish leaders there, told me that this man did a lot of bad things. They asked me to say he is guilty, and to tell my soldiers to kill him.

¹⁶But I told them, ‘That’s not the way we Romans judge people. If somebody blames another person, we don’t say he is guilty until after we get him, and the people that are blaming him, all into a court room together. And we give him a chance to say why he reckons he is not guilty.’

¹⁷So those Jewish leaders came here to Caesarea with me. I didn’t waste any time. The next day I sat down in the court room, I told some soldiers to bring Paul in.

¹⁸The Jewish leaders stood up and blamed him, but they didn’t blame him for anything really bad, like I thought they would.

¹⁹They only talked about things that some Jews believe and other Jews don’t believe. They argued about a dead man called Jesus, and Paul kept saying, ‘Jesus is alive.’