Acts 21: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Paul and his companions sail from Miletus to Tyre, then travel through Ptolemais to Caesarea, where the prophet Agabus acts out a warning that Paul will be bound in Jerusalem and handed over to the Gentiles. Paul refuses to be turned back, and in Jerusalem he reports to James and the elders, who advise him to join four men in a purification rite to show he still keeps the law. Jews from Asia see him in the temple and accuse him of bringing Greeks inside, and a mob seizes him. The Roman commander rescues him, chains him, and lets him speak to the crowd from the barracks steps.

Claim by Claim

1. 21:1
   • Paul's company tore themselves away from those who had been with them
   • They put out to sea
   • They ran a straight course and came to Cos
   • The next day they came to Rhodes
   • From Rhodes they came to Patara
2. 21:2
   • They found a ship crossing over to Phoenicia
   • They boarded the ship
   • They set sail
3. 21:3
   • They came in sight of Cyprus
   • They left Cyprus on the left side and sailed on
   • They sailed to Syria
   • They landed at Tyre
   • The ship was to unload its cargo at Tyre
4. 21:4
   • They searched out and found the disciples
   • They stayed there seven days
   • The disciples told Paul through the Spirit that he should not go up to Jerusalem
5. 21:5
   • They completed those days
   • They departed and went on their way
   • All the disciples, with wives and children, escorted them until they were outside the city
   • They knelt down on the shore
   • They prayed
6. 21:6
   • They said farewell to one another
   • Paul's company boarded the ship
   • The disciples returned to their own homes
7. 21:7
   • They finished the voyage from Tyre
   • They arrived at Ptolemais
   • They greeted the brothers there
   • They stayed with them one day
8. 21:8
   • The next day those of Paul's company departed
   • They came to Caesarea
   • They entered the house of Philip the evangelist
   • Philip was one of the seven
   • They stayed with Philip
9. 21:9
   • Philip had four daughters
   • The four daughters were virgins
   • The four daughters prophesied
10. 21:10
    • They stayed there many days
    • A prophet came down from Judea
    • The prophet was named Agabus
11. 21:11
    • Agabus came to them
    • He took Paul's belt
    • He bound his own hands and feet with it
    • He said that this is what the Holy Spirit says
    • He said the Jews at Jerusalem would bind the owner of that belt in this same manner
    • He said they would hand the owner of the belt over into the hands of the Gentiles
12. 21:12
    • They heard these things
    • Both Paul's companions and the local people begged Paul not to go up to Jerusalem
13. 21:13
    • Paul answered them
    • Paul asked what they meant by weeping and breaking his heart
    • Paul said he was ready not only to be bound but also to die at Jerusalem
    • Paul said this readiness was for the name of the Lord Jesus
14. 21:14
    • Paul would not be persuaded
    • The others fell silent
    • They said the will of the Lord be done
15. 21:15
    • After those days they packed up their baggage
    • They went up to Jerusalem
16. 21:16
    • Some of the disciples from Caesarea went with them
    • The disciples brought Mnason with them
    • Mnason was a Cypriot
    • Mnason was a disciple from the early days
    • They were to lodge with Mnason
17. 21:17
    • They arrived in Jerusalem
    • The brothers received them gladly
18. 21:18
    • The following day Paul went in with them to James
    • All the elders were present
19. 21:19
    • Paul greeted them
    • Paul related one by one the things God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry
20. 21:20
    • They heard Paul's account
    • They glorified the Lord
    • They said to Paul that he could see how many thousands of Jews there were who had believed
    • They said all these believing Jews were zealous for the law
21. 21:21
    • They said Paul had been reported to teach all the Jews living among the Gentiles to forsake Moses
    • They said the report was that Paul told them not to circumcise their children
    • They said the report was that Paul told them not to walk according to the customs
22. 21:22
    • They asked what then is to be done
    • They said the multitude must necessarily come together
    • They said the people would certainly hear that Paul had come
23. 21:23
    • They told Paul to do what they were telling him
    • They said they had four men who were under a vow
24. 21:24
    • They told Paul to take those men
    • They told Paul to purify himself along with them
    • They told Paul to pay their expenses so that they could shave their heads
    • They said that then everyone would know that the reports about Paul were nothing
    • They said everyone would know that Paul himself walked orderly and kept the law
25. 21:25
    • They said that concerning the Gentiles who had believed, they had written a letter with their decision
    • They said the decision was that the Gentile believers observe no such thing
    • They said the Gentile believers should keep themselves from things sacrificed to idols
    • They said the Gentile believers should keep themselves from blood
    • They said the Gentile believers should keep themselves from what is strangled
    • They said the Gentile believers should keep themselves from fornication
26. 21:26
    • Paul took the men
    • The next day Paul purified himself with them
    • Paul entered the temple
    • Paul gave notice of when the days of purification would be fulfilled
    • The offering was to be presented for each one of them
27. 21:27
    • The seven days were about to be completed
    • The Jews from Asia saw Paul in the temple
    • They stirred up the whole crowd
    • They laid hands on Paul
28. 21:28
    • They cried out for the men of Israel to help
    • They said this is the man who teaches everyone everywhere against the people
    • They said he teaches against the law
    • They said he teaches against this place
    • They said he had also brought Greeks into the temple
    • They said he had defiled this holy place
29. 21:29
    • They had previously seen Trophimus with Paul in the city
    • Trophimus was an Ephesian
    • They supposed that Paul had brought Trophimus into the temple
30. 21:30
    • The whole city was stirred
    • The people ran together
    • They seized Paul
    • They dragged Paul out of the temple
    • The doors were immediately shut
31. 21:31
    • They were seeking to kill Paul
    • A report reached the commander of the cohort
    • The report was that all Jerusalem was in confusion
32. 21:32
    • The commander immediately took soldiers and centurions
    • He ran down to the crowd
    • The crowd saw the commander and the soldiers
    • They stopped beating Paul
33. 21:33
    • The commander came near
    • He took hold of Paul
    • He ordered Paul to be bound with two chains
    • He asked who Paul was
    • He asked what Paul had done
34. 21:34
    • Some in the crowd shouted one thing and some another
    • The commander could not learn the certainty because of the uproar
    • He ordered Paul to be brought into the barracks
35. 21:35
    • Paul came to the steps
    • Paul had to be carried by the soldiers
    • He was carried because of the violence of the crowd
36. 21:36
    • The multitude of the people followed after
    • They kept shouting to take him away
37. 21:37
    • Paul was about to be led into the barracks
    • Paul asked the commander whether it was permitted for him to say something to him
    • The commander asked whether Paul knew Greek
38. 21:38
    • The commander asked whether Paul was the Egyptian who before these days had stirred up a revolt
    • The commander said that Egyptian had led four thousand men of the assassins out into the wilderness
39. 21:39
    • Paul said he was a Jew
    • Paul said he was from Tarsus in Cilicia
    • Paul said he was a citizen of no insignificant city
    • Paul asked the commander to permit him to speak to the people
40. 21:40
    • The commander gave Paul permission
    • Paul stood on the steps
    • Paul motioned with his hand to the people
    • A great silence came over them
    • Paul addressed them in the Hebrew language

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

21:1

From here the account is told in the first person, "we," as by someone traveling with Paul; the narrator never names himself. Cos, Rhodes and Patara are harbors and islands strung along the southwestern coast of Asia Minor, in what is now Turkey. The small coastal vessel they were on worked its way from port to port.

21:2

Phoenicia was the narrow coastal strip of what is now Lebanon and northern Israel, with Tyre and Sidon as its chief ports. This second ship was a larger vessel making the open-water crossing rather than hugging the coast.

21:3

"We left it on the left hand" means Cyprus stayed off the port side, so the ship passed to the south of the island on a southeasterly run toward the Syrian coast. Tyre was the leading Phoenician port and a natural place for a cargo ship to break its voyage.

21:4

"Go up to Jerusalem" is the standard idiom: Jerusalem sits high in the hill country, and Jews spoke of going up to it from any direction. The Greek of this verse is genuinely open: it can mean the Spirit itself told Paul not to go, or that the Spirit showed these believers what awaited him and they, on their own, urged him to stay away. Both readings have been defended since antiquity.

21:7

Ptolemais was the ancient port of Acco, some twenty-five miles south of Tyre; the modern city is Acre. "The brethren" in the King James means fellow believers generally, men and women alike, not male relatives.

21:8

Caesarea was a harbor city built by Herod the Great and the seat of the Roman governor of Judea. "Evangelist" simply means an announcer of good news; it carried no sense of a modern preaching career. "One of the seven" points back to the seven men appointed in Acts 6 to oversee the daily distribution of food to widows in the Jerusalem congregation.

21:9

"Virgins" here means unmarried, nothing more. To prophesy meant to speak a message understood as coming from God; it could involve prediction, as with Agabus below, but also encouragement or rebuke.

21:10

Agabus appears earlier in Acts, at Antioch, where he foretold a widespread famine. Judea here means the inland region around Jerusalem, as distinct from the coastal city they were sitting in.

21:11

A "girdle" was a long cloth sash wound several times around the waist, easily long enough to serve as a rope and often used as a purse as well. Tying himself up with it is an acted-out message, a method Israel's older prophets used often: the message is performed before it is spoken. "Gentiles" means non-Jews; in this prediction it points to the Roman authorities.

21:14

"The will of the Lord be done" is not agreement that the journey is a good idea. It is the standard formula for dropping an argument you have lost and handing the outcome over.

21:15

"Carriages" in 1611 English meant the things carried, that is, baggage, not any kind of vehicle. The sense is simply that they packed up.

21:16

"An old disciple" translates a word meaning original or from the early days. Mnason was a believer of long standing, probably from the first years of the movement, which is not quite the same as saying he was elderly.

21:18

This James led the Jerusalem congregation and is identified elsewhere in the New Testament as a brother of Jesus. He is not James the son of Zebedee, who had been executed years earlier. "Elders" were the recognized senior leaders of the community, a structure borrowed from the synagogue.

21:20

The word behind "thousands" is literally "myriads," tens of thousands, a round expression for a very large number rather than a headcount. "Zealous of the law" means zealous for the law, that is, committed to keeping the commandments given through Moses. These are Jewish believers in Jesus who had not stopped living as Jews.

21:21

Circumcision, the cutting away of the foreskin on the eighth day after birth, was the physical sign of the covenant with Abraham and the clearest marker of Jewish identity. "To forsake Moses" means to abandon the law of Moses; "walk after the customs" means to live by the inherited Jewish practices. The charge is that Paul was telling Jews abroad to stop being Jews, which he denies.

21:23

The vow is almost certainly a Nazirite vow, set out in Numbers 6: for a fixed period the person drank no wine, ate nothing from the grapevine, avoided contact with a corpse, and left the hair uncut. At the end the head was shaved at the temple and specific animal and grain offerings were presented.

21:24

"Be at charges with them" means pay their expenses. The offerings that closed a Nazirite vow (two lambs, a ram, bread, grain and wine) were costly, and paying them for someone who could not afford it was a widely admired act of piety. Paul, arriving from Gentile territory, would himself need a period of ritual cleansing before he could take part in temple rites alongside them.

21:25

This refers back to the letter sent out after the Jerusalem meeting in Acts 15. The four items are food restrictions plus one moral one: meat from animals sacrificed in pagan temples, much of which was resold in ordinary markets; blood, which Jewish law forbade eating; animals killed by strangling, since their blood was not drained; and "fornication," a broad Greek word covering sexual conduct outside marriage generally.

21:26

Entering the temple "to signify the accomplishment of the days" means giving formal notice to the priests of the date on which the vow period would end, so that the closing sacrifices could be scheduled.

21:27

"Asia" is the Roman province occupying western Asia Minor, with Ephesus as its principal city, not the continent. These men would have known Paul by sight from his long stay in Ephesus.

21:28

The temple had graded courts. The outer court was open to anyone, but stone notices in Greek and Latin warned that any foreigner who passed the barrier into the inner courts had only himself to blame for the death that followed; two of these inscriptions have been dug up. Rome, unusually, allowed the Jewish authorities to enforce that penalty. "This place" means the temple itself.

21:29

Trophimus came from Ephesus, in the province of Asia, which is exactly why the men from Asia recognized him in the street. Seeing him with Paul in the city, they jumped to the conclusion that Paul had also taken him past the barrier.

21:30

The doors are the gates of the inner temple courts, shut by the temple guards. Whether this was to keep bloodshed out of the sanctuary or to stop Paul from getting back inside to claim its protection, the text does not say.

21:31

"The chief captain of the band" is a Roman tribune commanding a cohort, a unit of roughly a thousand men. His name, given later, was Claudius Lysias. The garrison was housed in the fortress of Antonia at the northwest corner of the temple courts, overlooking them, with stairs running down into the outer court; that is why troops could reach the riot within moments.

21:32

Centurions were officers who each commanded about a hundred men. That more than one came means a substantial detachment poured down the stairs.

21:33

Two chains means Paul was chained by each wrist to a soldier on either side of him, the standard Roman way of securing a prisoner in a crowd.

21:34

"Castle" in 1611 English meant a fortified garrison building. Here it is the barracks inside the Antonia fortress next to the temple. "Could not know the certainty for the tumult" means he could not find out what had actually happened because of the noise.

21:36

"Away with him" is not a demand for removal but for death, the same shout raised at the trial of Jesus in Luke's Gospel.

21:37

The commander's surprise is the point. He had assumed Paul was an uneducated foreign agitator, and hearing him speak polished Greek immediately upsets that assumption.

21:38

The Jewish historian Josephus describes an Egyptian who, a few years before this, gathered a following into the wilderness and then to the Mount of Olives claiming the walls of Jerusalem would fall; Roman troops under the governor Felix cut the movement down, but the leader escaped, which is why the commander thinks he may have him in hand. The word the King James renders "murderers" is the Greek borrowing of the Latin "sicarii," the dagger-men: nationalist assassins who hid short curved knives under their cloaks and stabbed opponents in festival crowds.

21:39

"No mean city" means no insignificant one; "mean" in 1611 English meant lowly or of low rank. Tarsus, in Cilicia in southeastern Asia Minor, was a wealthy trading city famous for its schools of philosophy, so the claim was a real one.

21:40

"Licence" here simply means permission. The Greek phrase behind "the Hebrew tongue" can mean either Hebrew itself or Aramaic, the everyday spoken language of Jews in Judea at this period, and scholars are divided on which is meant. Either way, the point is that Paul switched out of Greek into the crowd's own language.