Acts 21:28
Crying out, Men of Israel, help: This is the man, that teacheth all men every where against the people, and the law, and this place: and further brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath polluted this holy place. Crying out, Men of Israel, help: This is the man, that teacheth all men every where against the people, and the law, and this place: and further brought Greeks also into the temple, and hath polluted this holy place.
The cry was raised by Jews from Asia who seized Paul in the temple because they knew him from Ephesus, where they had been defeated in controversy with him in the synagogue and had become enraged at his success in raising up a Christian church. They saw him within the precincts of the temple during a crowded feast when strangers from all regions thronged Jerusalem, rushed on him, and raised the cry to excite the people to the highest pitch. The cry accused him of teaching all men everywhere against the people, and the law, and the temple, and of polluting the holy place by bringing Greeks into it.
The pollution charge was wholly false and was only conjectured because Paul had been seen in the city with Trophimus the Ephesian; it was assumed he had brought him into the temple, which he had not done. As a Jew, Paul's own entering was no violation of the law, but under Jewish law it was a crime punishable with death for an uncircumcised person to enter the inner courts. The false charge stirred popular prejudice, the cry spread through the temple courts, all the city was moved, and the mob regarded him as an apostate profaning the temple at worship time, dragged him from the sacred enclosure with blows, closed the gates behind him lest the holy place be polluted with blood, and determined to stone him to death.
The verse belongs to the uproar before the Jerusalem crowd after which Paul began a defense from the temple stairs, speaking in Hebrew, and the familiar language made the people listen more quietly. The denunciation of Paul as a polluter of the temple was used to attack his character and discredit his teaching when his opponents could not defend their position from Scripture. The verse is an example of how those who reprove sin and defend unpopular truth may be branded as enemies of sacred things and denounced as evildoers.