Acts 21:27-40 Paul Seized in the Temple.

The Jews from Asia were not the believing Jews in Jerusalem, but the Jews who had not believed in Christ, and they had come from Asia, quite likely from the region around Ephesus where Paul had ministered for a few years. It is quite likely they knew Trophimus from their home region; from the text it seems that Trophimus was a Gentile. So they either leaped to the conclusion, or used this as a false accusation for the purpose of inciting a riot. Paul was physically assaulted, but before the rioters could kill him, the Roman army intervened to quell the riot. The Chiliarch (commander of 1,000) was unable to get any meaningful response from the mob. It is not clear if he took Paul into protective custody, or simply wanted to remove him from the mob as the focus of the unrest. The conversation indicates that the Roman officer thought he was an Egyptian who led a revolt a few years earlier in Jerusalem. Perhaps this was because of the size and violence of the mob. These assassins were not the assassins we more typically think of in history, the cult of assassins that was prominent in eleventh through thirteenth centuries A.D., and were not located in Israel, but in Western Iran, centered in Alamut. Furthermore, they were from the Ismaili sect of Islam, not Jewish. The assassins referred to here were labeled with a Roman term for a public bandit murderer, transliterated to Greek as sikarios.

          Paul indicated that he was a Roman citizen and asked permission to speak to the crowd. Being a Roman citizen was a fairly significant card that Paul only played sparingly, but here he put it to good use, to get an opportunity to present the gospel in Jerusalem.