Peter's sermon at Solomon's Colonnade

Solomon's Colonnade was the covered portico running the length of the eastern side of the temple platform, a roofed walkway with rows of columns where people sheltered from sun and rain and where teachers gathered listeners. The name attached it to the first temple, though the structure was Herod's.

Peter's opening question sets the tone. Fellow Israelites, why does this surprise you? Why do you stare at us as if by our own power or godliness we had made this man walk?

The sermon that follows is short and its charges are direct. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.

Then, immediately, a mitigation that softens the whole thing: now, brothers and sisters, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did your leaders.

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord.

The scriptural argument runs through two figures. Moses first, who had said that God would raise up a prophet like him from among their own people, and that anyone who did not listen to him would be cut off. Then Abraham, and the promise that through his offspring all peoples on earth would be blessed, which is quoted with the word all doing the same work it did at Pentecost.

He also uses a title for Jesus that appears almost nowhere else: God's servant, which reaches back to the servant songs in Isaiah, including the one about a man pierced for the transgressions of others.

Two details are worth registering about the setting. This is being said in the temple courts, within sight of the priesthood, about the priesthood's own decision a few weeks earlier. And the healed man is standing next to him the entire time.

While Peter and John are still speaking, the priests, the captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees come up to them, greatly disturbed because the apostles were teaching the people and proclaiming in Jesus the resurrection of the dead.

They are arrested and held overnight, because it is already evening. The number of men who believed grew to about five thousand.

The colonnade ran roughly four hundred metres along the eastern edge of the platform, and Josephus describes its columns as single blocks of white stone, high enough that the roof was a considerable height above the pavement. A speaker there had shade, an audience and acoustics.

The mitigation Peter offers, that they acted in ignorance, is the same thing said from the cross, and it appears in every one of these early sermons. The accusation is direct and the door is left open in the same breath.

The prophet like Moses is a passage the Samaritans also held to, and it appears again in the mouth of the crowd at the Feast of Tabernacles. It was one of the standard expectations of the period.