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especially because you are expert in all customs and questions which are among the Yehudim. Therefore I beg you to hear me patiently.
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"Indeed, all the Yehudim know my way of life from my youth up, which was from the beginning among my own nation and at Yerushalayim;
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having known me from the first, if they are willing to testify, that after the strictest sect of our religion I lived a Parush.
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Now I stand here to be judged for the hope of the promise made by God to our fathers,
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which our twelve tribes, earnestly serving night and day, hope to attain. Concerning this hope I am accused by the Yehudim, King Agrippa!
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Why is it judged incredible with you, if God does raise the dead?
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"I myself most assuredly thought that I ought to do many things contrary to the name of Yeshua of Natzeret.
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This I also did in Yerushalayim. I both shut up many of the holy ones in prisons, having received authority from the chief Kohanim, and when they were put to death I gave my vote against them.
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Punishing them often in all the synagogues, I tried to make them blaspheme. Being exceedingly enraged against them, I persecuted them even to foreign cities.
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"Whereupon as I journeyed to Dammesek with the authority and commission from the chief Kohanim,
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at noon, O King, I saw on the way a light from the sky, brighter than the sun, shining around me and those who traveled with me.