Acts 21:19-38

¹⁹Paul said hello to them, and then he told them about all of the things that God helped him do in the countries of the people that are not Jews.

²⁰After they heard his story, James and the other leaders said, “Thank you God. You are great.” Then they said to Paul, “Listen, Brother, there are thousands of Jewish people here that believe in Jesus, and they are very careful to do everything in the law that Moses gave us.

²¹But we have heard people say that you tell the Jewish Christians in those other countries to stop following our law. Those people reckon you tell Jewish people not to do a young man operation on their sons, and they reckon you tell Jewish people to stop doing other things from our culture. We know their story isn’t true,

²²but some of the other Jewish people here believe that story about you. They will hear that you came here, and they might be upset with you. So, you need to do something to show everyone that the story they heard about you is not true.

²³So listen. Do this to show everyone that the story they tell about you is not true. You see, there are 4 men among us that have promised something to God, so they have to buy things to do a ceremony to make themselves clean.

²⁴So you join those men and go with them to God’s ceremony house, and do that ceremony with them, and pay for the things they buy. Then they can shave their heads. That’s our culture to show that they have done everything they promised to do. And the people will see you do all that with those men at the temple, and they will know that the things people told them about you are not true, and they will know that you do everything in our Jewish law and culture.

²⁵We leaders know that the Christians that are not Jews don’t have to do everything in our Jewish law, and we wrote them a letter, and we told them, – Don’t eat meat that people gave to a statue they reckoned was a god. – And don’t eat blood. – And if somebody held an animal’s neck to kill it, don’t eat meat from that animal. – And don’t sleep with people that you are not married to, as if they are they are your wives or husbands. That’s what we wrote in our letter.”

²⁶Paul listened to everything they said, and he agreed to do that ceremony with those 4 men. The next day he got them together and they started to do the ceremony to make themselves clean. After that, Paul went to God’s ceremony house, and he told the leader of the Jewish ceremonies the date they will finish that ceremony and give animals to God for each of them, the way they do in Jewish culture.

²⁷Paul and the other 4 men had to do that ceremony for 7 days to make themselves clean. Just before it finished, Paul walked along the road with a man that was not a Jew. His name was Trophimus. Some Jews from Asia country saw them together, and they thought that Paul took Trophimus into God’s ceremony house, and that was against their Jewish law. The next day Paul went back to the temple and those Asia Jews saw him there. They called out to the other Jews there, they shouted, “Hey, you Israel men, come and help us punish this man. This is the man that teaches people everywhere to rubbish us Jewish people, and our law, and he tells them not to respect this place, the temple. He even brought a man that is not a Jew into the temple, so now it is not clean any more.” Then all those Jewish people got angry with Paul.

³⁰A lot of people everywhere in that city heard that there was trouble in God’s ceremony house, and they got up and ran there. They all grabbed Paul and dragged him outside. Then straight away the guards shut the gates of the temple.

³¹That mob started hitting Paul, trying to kill him. Somebody went to the big Roman boss and said, “Hey, the people in Jerusalem are going wild.”

³²So he quickly got a big mob of soldiers, and some of their bosses too, and they all ran to the mob that was hitting Paul. The mob saw the Roman soldiers and their big boss, so they stopped hitting Paul.

³³Then the big boss told his soldiers to grab Paul and tie him up with 2 chains. Then he asked that mob, “What did this man do?”

³⁴Some of the people there started shouting one thing, and some started shouting something else, and they kept shouting really loud. There was too much noise and the big boss couldn’t understand them. So he told the soldiers, “Take him into your big house.”

³⁵Then the soldiers took Paul away, and a lot of people followed them. Those people were trying to hit Paul all the time. They came to the steps of their big house and the boss told the soldiers to carry Paul up the steps into their house.

³⁶The mob kept shouting, “Kill him. Kill him.”

³⁷The soldiers started to take him into their house, but Paul talked to the boss in the Greek language. He said, “Can I talk to you?” The boss said, “Can you talk Greek?

³⁸I thought you were that man from Egypt country that wants to fight against us Romans. He was the man that took 4,000 murderers out into the desert with him, so we couldn’t catch him. You are that man, aren’t you?”