Acts 3:2

From his mother’s womb. The careful record of the duration of the man’s suffering is rather characteristic of Luke (see chs. 9:33; 14:8). The cripple was about 40 years old at the time of his healing (see on ch. 4:22).

Was carried. Better, “was being carried,” or “used to be carried.” The Greek may be understood here as indicating either that the lame man was being carried to his place of begging when he accosted the apostles or that he was already sitting there when Peter and John appeared. In those days there were neither hospitals nor poorhouses; so to be helped, the lame man must be placed where well-disposed folk could see his condition (see Mark 10:46; Luke 16:20; 18:35). The crowds going to the Temple would be inclined to help by the religious feeling of the moment.

Gate ... called Beautiful. No gate by this name is known elsewhere in the Bible or in Jewish literature. The opinion of scholars is divided generally as to whether this gate is to be identified with the Shushan Gate in the outermost wall on the east side of the Temple area, or with the Nicanor Gate, which probably led from the Court of the Gentiles into the Court of the Women. Some have placed this latter gate between the Court of the Women and that of the Men. Whether the Beautiful Gate constituted a part of the outer wall or was between the courts seems to depend largely on the route the apostles are thought to have taken in the present narrative. Luke records that they came to the gate, healed the man, entered the Temple, and apparently after they had offered their prayers, met a crowd of persons in Solomon’s Porch who had been attracted by the miracle. Inasmuch as Solomon’s Porch appears to have been just inside the eastern outer wall (see on v. 11), the Beautiful Gate may have been the outer, Shushan, gate, for if it were an inner gate between the courts, it would have been necessary for the apostles to go out through it again in order to reach Solomon’s Porch. However, it seems rather difficult to account for Peter’s and John’s having used such a gate in the beginning, for it led from the Mount of Olives and would scarcely have been in the direction from which they would have entered the Temple, living in the city as they were. Compared with other gates leading directly from the city into the Temple, it must have been little used, and would hardly be a place for a beggar habitually to sit. Because of these apparent difficulties, many scholars prefer to suppose that the apostles did go out again through the Beautiful Gate before meeting the crowd in Solomon’s Porch, and that this gate is to be identified with the Nicanor Gate, situated probably between the Court of the Gentiles and the Court of the Women. Josephus describes this gate thus: “One, that outside the sanctuary, was of Corinthian bronze, and far exceeded in value those plated with silver and set in gold” (War v. 5. 3 [201]). Concerning this same gate the Mishnah declares: “All the original gates were changed for gates of gold except the gates of Nicanor, because a miracle was wrought to them; some say, however, it was because the copper of them gleamed [like gold]” (Mishnah Middoth 2. 3, Soncino ed. of the Talmud, pp. 7, 8). Taking all the evidence together, it seems probable that the Beautiful Gate is to be identified with the Nicanor Gate.

To ask alms. The approaches of the Temple, like those of a modern mosque and some of the great cathedrals of Europe, doubtless were thronged with the blind, the lame, the deformed, and mendicants of all sorts.