<p>11:23 <em>Are they servants of Christ? (I speak as like a madman) I more, with far greater labours, far more imprisonments, with countless beatings, and often near death</em>- We note that only a fraction of Paul's sufferings are recorded in Acts, which is a reminder that Biblical history is highly condensed. We see a fraction of the biography of the people we encounter in the pages of the Bible. Many of the imprisonments and beatings would have been at the hand of the synagogue system, which had the authority to discipline their members with temporary arrests and beatings. As we will also note on :24, Paul could have avoided these by making a clean break with Judaism, leaving the ministry to the Jew to Peter as the Lord intended, and going solely to the Gentiles. But he chose not to follow completely the Lord's intention for his ministry- and suffered for it. I have given multiple examples in commentary on Acts. This doesn't mean the Lord didn't work with him; but as in our own lives, going His way is easier than insisting upon our own ways. Some of the beatings may have been from the Romans; but in this case, we wonder why they beat him, seeing that they did not beat Roman citizens like Paul (Acts 22:25,26; 23:27). Perhaps he had been unable to prove his citizenship in some cases; or perhaps he preferred to identify as a Jew and downplayed his Roman citizenship, suffering for it, because he so wished to identify with Israel in order to bring Israel to the Lord Jesus. In Philippi he seems to have kept quiet about his citizenship until after he had been scourged. But again, so much of this could have been avoided if Paul had followed the path of ministry envisaged by the Lord, to go to the Gentiles and leave the Jews to Peter.</p><p>Paul was ever aware of his own proneness to failure. He saw himself as tempted to be like the man in the parable who thought he should have more, because he had laboured more abundantly than the others (Mt. 20:12 Gk. = 2 Cor. 11:23).</p>