Acts 21:5-34

⁵The ship workers finished unloading the ship, and then it was time for it to leave, so we went back to the sea shore. All the Christian men and their wives and kids went with us to the ship. We all got down on our knees there on the sand, to show respect to God, and we prayed.

⁶After that we all said goodbye, then Paul and his friends got on the ship, and the other Christians went back to their homes.

⁷We left Tyre on that ship and went to a town called Ptolemais. There were Christians in that town too, so we went and said hello to them, and we stayed with them that night.

⁸The next day we left Ptolemais and sailed to the town called Caesarea. We left the ship there and went to Philip’s place, and we stayed with him. He was a man that was always telling other people the way to become followers of Jesus. (A few years before this the Christians in Jerusalem picked 7 men to take care of the Christian widows, and Philip was one of those men.

⁹He had 4 daughters that were not married. Each of them had power from the Holy Spirit to tell God’s special messages to people.)

¹⁰A few days later, a Christian called Agabus came to Caesarea from Judea country. He had power from the Holy Spirit to tell God’s special messages to people.

¹¹He came to us, and he took off Paul’s belt. Then he tied his own feet and hands with it and said, “The Holy Spirit says this, ‘See this man that owns this belt. The Jewish leaders in Jerusalem will tie him up, just like this, and they will give him as a prisoner to the people that are not Jews.’”

¹²The rest of us heard him say that, then we all talked really strongly to Paul. We said, “Please don’t go to Jerusalem.”

¹³But Paul said, “Hey, stop crying and trying to make me change my mind. Stop telling me not to go to Jerusalem. I work for our leader Jesus, so I’m happy for people to put me in prison in Jerusalem, and I’m even happy for them to kill me.”

¹⁴We tried to tell Paul not to go to Jerusalem, but he wouldn’t listen to us, so we stopped trying to tell him. We just said, “All right, we will be happy for our leader, Jesus, to do whatever he wants to do.”

¹⁵After a few days we got ready and left Caesarea, and we went to Jerusalem.

¹⁶Some of the Christians from Caesarea went with us too. They took us to stay in the house of a man called Mnason. He was from Cyprus Island. He was a Christian for a long time. He became a Christian when people were first starting to hear the message about Jesus.

¹⁷After we arrived in Jerusalem the Christians there were happy to see us and say hello to us.

¹⁸The next day Paul went to talk with a Christian leader called James, and we went with him. All of the other Christian leaders in Jerusalem were there too.

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.”