The temperature of the crowd was boiling over.  Plain and simple, they wanted to kill Paul.  He was ok with that.  In fact, he was the one who volunteered to share his testimony which he knew would be a problem for him and incite the crowd.

The commanded had come to his rescue and was going to hurt him to appease the crowd.  But then Paul pulled his Roman citizenship card.  You don’t put a fellow Roman in chains and beat him without a fair trial.  It was no small matter so that even the tough, Roman commander was afraid.

But now Paul was before the crowd.  They wanted him dead.  But he knew in the crowd there were 2 parties – the Pharisees and Sadducees.  They were two religious sects who had different views and hated each other. It would be something along the lines of Sunni and Shia Islam.  A nasty tension.

So Paul, knowing this, gets up and says he is a Pharisee, the son of a Pharisee and he is on trial for the resurrection of the dead.  And immediately any hostility towards Paul from the Pharisees changed and now they were all about defending him.  Of course this angered the Sadducees and the hostilities were so violent that Paul was almost ripped apart.

Why did Paul do this?

The truth is he wasn’t lying.  He was a Pharisee.  He was the son of a Pharisee.  And he was on trial for his belief in the resurrection of the dead.  Everything he said was true.

What Paul was practicing here was what Jesus talked about.