Facing The Fury Of The Mob

21:37-40 When Paul was about to be brought into the barracks he said to the commander, "May I say something to you?" He said, "Can you speak Greek? Are you not then the Egyptian who some time ago started a revolution and led four thousand men of the Dagger-bearers out into the desert?" Paul said, "I am a man who is a Jew, a native of Tarsus, a citizen of no mean city. I ask you, let me speak to the people." When he had given his permission to do so, Paul stood on the steps and made a gesture with his hand to the people. When a great silence had fallen, he spoke to them in the Hebrew tongue.

The Castle of Antonia was connected to the outer courts of the Temple by two flights of stairs on the northern and the western sides. As the soldiers were struggling towards the steps to reach the sanctuary of their own barracks, Paul made an amazing request. He asked the captain to be allowed to address the furious mob. Here is Paul exercising his consistent policy of looking the mob in the face.

The captain was amazed to hear the accents of cultured Greek coming from this man whom the crowd were out to lynch. Somewhere about A.D. 54 an Egyptian had led a band of desperate men out to the Mount of Olives with a promise that he could make the walls of the city fall down before him. The Romans had dealt swiftly and efficiently with his followers but he himself had escaped and the captain had thought that Paul was this revolutionary Egyptian come back.

His followers had been Dagger-bearers, violent nationalists who were deliberate assassins. They concealed daggers in their cloaks, mixed with the mob and struck as they could. But when Paul stated his credentials, the captain knew that, whatever else he was, he was no revolutionary thug; and so he allowed him to speak. When Paul turned to speak he made a gesture for silence, and, almost miraculously, complete silence fell on that roaring mob. Nothing in all the New Testament so shows the force of Paul's personality as this silence that he commanded from the mob who would have lynched him. At that moment the very power of God flowed through him.

-Barclay's Daily Study Bible (NT)