Acts 21
The full text of Acts 21 in the Trinity Bible Version — clear modern English, translated from the original Greek. Free to read.
1 After we had torn ourselves away from them, we put out to sea and sailed straight to Cos. The next day we went to Rhodes, and from there to Patara.
2 We found a ship crossing over to Phoenicia, went on board, and set sail.
3 After sighting Cyprus and passing to the south of it, we sailed on to Syria and landed at Tyre, where the ship was to unload its cargo.
4 We looked up the disciples there and stayed with them seven days. Through the Spirit they kept urging Paul not to go on to Jerusalem.
5 When it was time to leave, we set out on our way. All of them, with their wives and children, accompanied us out of the city, and there on the beach we knelt to pray.
6 After saying goodbye to each other, we boarded the ship, and they returned home.
7 We continued our voyage from Tyre and landed at Ptolemais, where we greeted the brothers and sisters and stayed with them for a day.
8 Leaving the next day, we reached Caesarea and stayed at the house of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven.
9 He had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.
10 After we had been there a number of days, a prophet named Agabus came down from Judea.
11 Coming over to us, he took Paul's belt, tied his own feet and hands with it, and said, "The Holy Spirit says: 'In this way the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt, and they will hand him over to the Gentiles.'"
12 When we heard this, we and the people there pleaded with Paul not to go up to Jerusalem.
13 Then Paul answered, "Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus."
14 When he would not be persuaded, we gave up and said, "The Lord's will be done."
15 After this we got ready and went up to Jerusalem.
16 Some of the disciples from Caesarea went with us and brought us to the home of Mnason, a man from Cyprus and one of the early disciples, with whom we were to stay.
17 When we arrived at Jerusalem, the brothers and sisters welcomed us warmly.
18 The next day Paul went in with us to see James, and all the elders were present.
19 Paul greeted them and reported in detail what God had done among the Gentiles through his ministry.
20 When they heard this, they praised God. Then they said to Paul: "You see, brother, how many thousands of Jews have believed, and all of them are zealous for the law.
21 They have been told that you teach all the Jews who live among the Gentiles to turn away from Moses, telling them not to circumcise their children or live according to our customs.
22 What should we do? They will certainly hear that you have come,
23 so do what we tell you. There are four men with us who have taken a vow.
24 Take these men, purify yourself along with them, and pay their expenses so they can have their heads shaved. Then everyone will know there is no truth in the reports about you, but that you yourself are living in obedience to the law.
25 As for the Gentile believers, we have written to them our decision that they should abstain from food sacrificed to idols, from blood, from the meat of strangled animals, and from sexual immorality."
26 The next day Paul took the men and purified himself along with them. Then he went into the temple to give notice of the date when the days of purification would end and the offering would be made for each of them.
27 When the seven days were nearly over, some Jews from the province of Asia saw Paul in the temple. They stirred up the whole crowd and seized him,
28 shouting, "Men of Israel, help us! This is the man who teaches everyone everywhere against our people and our law and this place. And besides, he has brought Greeks into the temple and defiled this holy place."
29 They had previously seen Trophimus the Ephesian in the city with Paul and assumed that Paul had brought him into the temple.
30 The whole city was stirred up, and the people came running from all directions. Seizing Paul, they dragged him out of the temple, and immediately the gates were shut.
31 While they were trying to kill him, news reached the commander of the Roman cohort that the whole of Jerusalem was in an uproar.
32 He immediately took some soldiers and centurions and ran down to the crowd. When the rioters saw the commander and his soldiers, they stopped beating Paul.
33 The commander came up, arrested him, and ordered him to be bound with two chains. Then he asked who he was and what he had done.
34 Some in the crowd shouted one thing and some another, and since the commander could not get at the truth because of the uproar, he ordered Paul to be taken into the barracks.
35 When Paul reached the steps, the violence of the mob was so great he had to be carried by the soldiers.
36 The crowd that followed kept shouting, "Away with him!"
37 As the soldiers were about to take Paul into the barracks, he asked the commander, "May I say something to you?" "Do you speak Greek?" he replied.
38 "Are you not then the Egyptian who started a revolt some time ago and led four thousand members of the Assassins out into the wilderness?"
39 Paul answered, "I am a Jew, from Tarsus in Cilicia, a citizen of no insignificant city. Please let me speak to the people."
40 After receiving the commander's permission, Paul stood on the steps and motioned to the crowd with his hand. When they had all become quiet, he addressed them in Aramaic:
Translation notes (11)
- Acts 21:4a The imperfect elegon, 'they kept saying', indicates repeated urging. The phrase dia tou pneumatos, 'through the Spirit', stands in tension with Acts 20:22, where Paul travels to Jerusalem bound by the Spirit; many interpreters hold that the Spirit revealed the coming suffering (compare Acts 21:11) and that the plea to stay away was the disciples' own inference from that revelation.
- Acts 21:9a Greek parthenoi (παρθένοι), 'virgins', here indicates unmarried women and is rendered 'unmarried'. Luke presents their prophesying without comment, consistent with Joel 2:28, cited in Acts 2:17, that 'your sons and your daughters will prophesy'. Prophetesses appear elsewhere in Scripture, including Huldah (2 Kings 22:14) and Anna (Luke 2:36).
- Acts 21:11a Agabus performs an enacted prophecy in the manner of Israel's prophets, who dramatized their oracles with symbolic actions (Isaiah 20:2-4; Jeremiah 13:1-11; Ezekiel 4). His opening formula, tade legei to pneuma to hagion, 'thus says the Holy Spirit', adapts the Septuagint's standard rendering of 'thus says the LORD', attributing to the Spirit the role the prophetic books assign to God himself.
- Acts 21:13a The Greek verb synthryptō (συνθρύπτω), 'to crush' or 'to shatter in pieces', appears only here in the New Testament. Paul's complaint is not merely of grief caused but of resolve being worn down; the friends' weeping threatens to crush his kardia, 'heart', understood as the seat of will and courage.
- Acts 21:20a Greek myriades, literally 'tens of thousands' or 'myriads', is a stronger term than the English 'thousands' suggests; the elders use deliberate hyperbole for the scale of Jewish belief in Jerusalem. The phrase zelotai tou nomou, 'zealots for the law', indicates that these believers continued full Torah observance, the historical situation underlying the request that follows.
- Acts 21:23a The Greek phrase euchēn echontes, 'having a vow', almost certainly refers to the Nazirite vow of Numbers 6:1-21, which ended with the shaving of the head and the offering of sacrifices at the temple. Paying the expenses of poorer Nazirites was regarded as an act of notable piety; Josephus reports that Herod Agrippa I did so on a large scale.
- Acts 21:25a This verse restates the apostolic decree of Acts 15:20 and 29. Greek pnikton, 'what is strangled', denotes animals killed without draining the blood, and so pairs naturally with the prohibition of blood itself. The Western textual tradition, represented by Codex Bezae, omits the strangled animals in the decree, recasting it as a purely moral list; the SBL Greek New Testament retains the fourfold form.
- Acts 21:28a Gentiles could enter only the temple's outer court; a stone barrier bore Greek inscriptions warning foreigners that crossing further meant death, one of which was discovered by Charles Clermont-Ganneau in 1871. The charge kekoinoken (κεκοίνωκεν), 'has defiled', literally means 'has made common', treating sacred space as profane. The accusation was thus a capital matter, not mere disapproval.
- Acts 21:37a The Greek Hellēnisti ginōskeis is literally 'do you know Greek?' Paul's polite, idiomatic request—ei exestin moi eipein ti pros se, 'is it permitted for me to say something to you?'—signals his education and prompts the commander's surprise, since he had assumed Paul was the Egyptian insurgent named in the next verse.
- Acts 21:38a The word sikarioi (σικάριοι), 'dagger-men', rendered here as 'Assassins', is a loanword from Latin sica, a curved dagger these militants concealed in their cloaks to kill in crowds. Josephus describes both the Sicarii and an Egyptian prophet who led followers to the Mount of Olives around AD 54 before Felix routed them, the episode the commander apparently has in mind.
- Acts 21:40a The Greek phrase means "in the Hebrew dialect," which here refers to the Aramaic language commonly spoken in first-century Judea.
About this translation
The Trinity Bible Version (TBV) is Trinity Bible's own modern English translation, worked directly from the original Greek and honest to the earliest manuscripts. It was completed in 2026 — the most modern English Bible translation — and is exclusive to Trinity Bible. Every chapter, including all of Acts, is free to read here on the web.
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