Biblion Bible Commentary
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The riot in the temple
Acts 21:27-36
27 When the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the multitude and laid hands on him, · WEB
The charge that nearly kills him rests on an assumption nobody checked, and the Roman army arrives in time to arrest the victim.
The Jews from Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the multitude. Not the Jerusalem authorities, who have done nothing to him. These are men from the province where Paul spent three years and lost them a great deal of argument, in the city for the feast.
The accusation has two parts. The first is a general charge: This is the man who teaches all men everywhere against the people, and the law, and this place. It is the same triple charge brought against Stephen in the same city, in the same order, and it is untrue in the same way — a distorted account of positions he actually held.
The second is specific and lethal: he also brought Greeks into the temple and has defiled this holy place. The inner courts were closed to Gentiles on pain of death, and the prohibition was carved on stone barriers at the entrance. Rome, which allowed almost nothing else, allowed the Jewish authorities to execute for this.
The writer then does something he rarely does and explains the charge's origin: For they had seen Trophimus the Ephesian with him in the city, and they supposed that Paul had brought him into the temple.
That sentence is the anatomy of a lynching. Two true facts — Trophimus is a Gentile, and he was seen with Paul in the city — and one supposition, which nobody verified, running from the street to the temple courts in the time it takes to shout. The charge that nearly ends Paul's life and does end his freedom is an inference.
The response is immediate and total. All the city was moved and the people ran together. They seized Paul and dragged him out of the temple. Immediately the doors were shut. The shutting of the doors is the grimmest detail. The temple staff close the sanctuary to keep it from being polluted by the killing about to occur on its steps — a scruple about the building maintained while a man is beaten to death outside it.
What saves him is the garrison. The Antonia fortress overlooked the temple courts precisely so that Rome could see a feast-day riot starting, and the commanding officer took soldiers and centurions and ran down to them. The beating stops when the soldiers appear, which is a fair measure of who actually controlled that city.
He is arrested — bound with two chains — which fulfills the first half of Agabus' prophecy, though the binding is done by Romans rather than Jews, and the handing over has already happened in the reverse direction. Prophecy in this book is regularly fulfilled with the details rearranged, and the writer never smooths them.
The tribune tries to establish what has happened and cannot: some shouted one thing and some another, exactly as at Ephesus. The crowd is so violent that on the barracks stairs he was carried by the soldiers, and behind him the shout is the one that was raised in this city thirty years earlier before another Roman governor: Away with him!
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