Acts 21 Footnotes

21:19-25 Paul told James and his elders of God’s work among the Gentiles. Although they glorified God in response, they claimed “thousands” (lit myriads) of Jews had believed. These were zealous for the law, reflecting a more restrictive (Pharisee-like) view of it. They heard that Paul taught Dispersion Jews not to follow the Mosaic law. Thus, they were concerned that Paul display devotion to the law by taking four men into the temple and paying for their Nazirite vow. This action, however, seemed to confuse matters in light of what Paul had done among the Gentiles.

21:28-29 Paul was apparently with Trophimus, an Ephesian (20:4; 21:29). Despite his views on the optional nature of circumcision, Paul, a Jew, was not consciously ignoring it. He well knew this would have endangered Trophimus’s life. This is attested by temple inscriptions that put Gentiles on notice that they would have only themselves to blame for their deaths if they transgressed the boundary of the sanctuary. Josephus (Antiquities of the Jews 15) describes this inscription. In 1877, two archaeologists discovered what has come to be called the Soreg Inscription.

21:31-32 The Romans had a cohort of soldiers stationed in the Antonia Fortress, located on the west side of the temple area, for just such eventualities. They desired to keep peace in Jerusalem and would restore peace at the first sign of trouble.

21:37–22:2 The Roman commander thought Paul was an Egyptian rebel, an unnamed messianic pretender who, according to Josephus, had gathered a number of people at the Mount of Olives to attack Jerusalem in about AD 54. The Romans put them to flight, but the leader escaped. This commander thought the rebel perhaps had reappeared. Instead, Paul spoke to the commander in Greek, his native language, an act entirely appropriate and to be expected for the Hellenistic Jew that he was. However, Paul also knew Aramaic and addressed the crowd in that language—not because they could not possibly have known Greek, but because the politically sensitive situation demanded use of the “native” language.

21:39 Paul gave an apt, accurate presentation of himself. He was a Jew by ethnicity and religion and a citizen of Tarsus in Cilicia, which was a city of importance in the Greco-Roman world (a fact accounting for his knowledge of Greek). Later he noted his Roman citizenship (22:27-29).