“And when the seven days were almost completed, the Jews from Asia, when they saw him in the temple, stirred up all the crowd and laid hands on him, crying out, “Men of Israel, help. This is the man who teaches all men everywhere against the people, and the law, and this place, and moreover he brought Greeks also into the temple, and has defiled this holy place.”
The first few days went by perfectly satisfactorily. There would in fact have been no outcry had it not been that ‘the Jews from Asia' saw him in the Temple. As they had recognised Trophimus elsewhere (Acts 21:29) some of them must have been Ephesians. These had already been spoken of as ‘hardened and disobedient' and as ‘speaking evil of the Way' (Acts 19:8-9). They had in fact probably been keeping their eyes open for him, and when they saw him in the Temple their evil surfaced. Out of total prejudice they just assumed the worst about him. They had no reasonable grounds for it. The truth was that they hated him and wanted him dead, and truth came second to that. There is nothing to be said which can soften the suggestion that they were wholly evil. They knew perfectly well that they were calling for him to be beaten to death, but did not take the trouble to ascertain the facts (which their own Law insisted that they must do - Deuteronomy 13:14). They would look into that once he was dead. It was his death they wanted, no matter how obtained. There was nothing pious about this but all that was wicked. They were nothing but would be murderers. And we can be sure that if they had not got him this way, they would have got him somehow. They were determined assassins, although they would have convinced themselves otherwise.
They sought to achieve their ends by rousing the people. They declared, totally untruthfully, that ‘this is the one' who teaches all men everywhere ‘against the people, and against the Law, and against ‘this place' (the temple)'. This was precisely the charge that had been laid against Stephen (Acts 6:13). How this suggestion could tie in with what he was doing in the Temple only they could explain. But they were not interested in truth. They were the worst kind of Jew.
The charge was not true. Paul certainly never spoke against the people as such. He showed continual respect for the Temple (as he makes clear in his speech). And he respected the Law and lived by it. His arguments concerning the Law actually upheld the Law (Romans 3:31). All he did when he appeared to speak against it was reveal as foolish certain misrepresentations of the Law as proclaimed by the Judaisers (who as far as we know represented no one but themselves).
But however heinous these things might have seemed to be to uninformed Jews, they were not punishable under Roman justice by death. There was only one crime that allowed instant execution. Bringing a Gentile into the inner courts. There were in fact notices warning of this, and one discovered by an archaeologist read, "No man of another nation is to enter within the fence and enclosure round the temple. And whoever is caught will have himself to blame that his death ensues." (The fence was a stone balustrade about four and a half feet/one and a half metres in height). So that was the crime that they now accused him of. And they compounded their sin by pretending that their complaint was for pious reasons, ‘this holy place', as though they were really concerned about its holiness. They were revealing themselves to be the most despicable and hypocritical of people, for it was they who were defiling the holy place by their false and unreasonable charges. Yet they tried to accuse him of doing so. They were piling evil upon evil.