(i.e. God is my recorder), a member of the Sanhedrim in the early times of Christianity, who, by his favourable interference, saved the apostles from an ignominious death (Acts v. 34). He was the teacher of the apostle Paul before the conversion of the latter (Acts xxii. 3). He bears in the Talmud the surname of Hazoken, "the old man," and is represented as the son of Rabbi Simeon, and grandson of the famous Hillel. He is said to have occupied a seat, if not the presidency, in the Sanhedrim during the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, and to have died eighteen years after the destruction of Jerusalem. There are idle traditions about his having been converted to Christianity by Peter and John (Phot. Cod. clxxi., p. 199); but they are altogether irreconcilable with the esteem and respect in which he was held even in later times by the Jewish Rabbins, by whom his opinions are frequently quoted as an all-silencing authority on points of religious law.