At the top of the stairs, just as the Roman soldiers are about to take Paul into the Antonia fortress barracks, away from the tumult of the pursuing mob, the apostle asks permission to speak with the commander. Paul's polite and polished Greek catches the tribune off guard; he replies, Do you speak Greek? He had expected the cause of such a disturbance to be a Jew of rough character and no education. Now he tries to place him among foreigners who were potential troublemakers. Is he that Egyptian false prophet who, some four to five years earlier (A.D. 54), had raised up a large following, four thousand terrorists, taken them into the desert and returned to the Mount of Olives? From there, he had promised his band, he would command the walls of Jerusalem to fall flat. The Roman garrison would then be an easy conquest, and the Egyptian could be installed as ruler (Josephus Jewish Wars 2.261-63; Jewish Antiquities 20.169-72). Governor Felix's troops, however, took preemptive action, slaying four hundred, taking two hundred prisoner and scattering the rest, including the Egyptian. Has he now returned to Jerusalem, and is the populace venting its anger on him for the failed revolt and its aftermath?

Paul answers that he is a Jew, not a foreign false prophet. This also explains why he is in the temple. He is citizen of Tarsus in Cilicia, not an Egyptian; a person with civic status, not a disenfranchised revolutionary. Tarsus of Cilicia, southeastern Asia Minor, was ten miles from the Mediterranean Sea on the Cydnus River, population 500,000 at the height of its prominence. It was of strategic importance, for it commanded the Cilician Gates, a pass through the Taurus Mountains which led to the central Asia Minor plateau and trade routes to the west. It was not an idle boast to call it no ordinary city. From the early days of the Empire, the life of Tarsus had been closely intertwined with that of the highest levels of Rome. Julius Caesar visited the city in 47 B.C., and Antony granted it the status of a free city in 42 B.C. Augustus sent Athendorus, his former tutor, a Stoic philosopher, back to his native Tarsus to reestablish just administration. Nestor, tutor to Marcellus, Augustus's intended heir, continued the Rome-decreed line of "philosopher-governors." The people of this university town had a zeal for learning and philosophy beyond that of Athens and Alexandria, though it did not attract as many students as the latter centers. Tarsians were known for finishing their schooling abroad and finally settling in Rome or elsewhere (Hemer 1988).

What Theophilus and we should learn from this interchange is not to confuse the gospel's liberation with political revolution. The Lord Jesus and his kingdom present a more radical challenge than that.

Paul asks and receives permission to speak to the crowd. His courage and determination are at once remarkable and readily understandable. What would cause him to want to address a crowd that had slandered him, given him an executioner's beating and, only minutes before, so violently rushed on him and called for his death that Roman soldiers had to physically pick him up so they could make a hasty exit? It is a total commitment to his Lord and his calling (20:23-24; compare Lk 21:13). This perspective gives the gospel its integrity. It's a stance we must all adopt.

With the stairs as his platform and the crowd below as his ready-made congregation, Paul stood . . . and motioned to the crowd with his hand (Acts 12:17; 13:16; 19:33). Miraculously, they become silent. Here is not simply the force of personality or even of a courageous character. Here the power of God is at work to gain a hearing for the battered, arrested, faithful apostle. Paul addresses the people in Aramaic (better, as the NIV margin states, in Hebrew—te Hebradi dialekto, literally, "in the Hebrew language"; see notes).