‘And as Paul was about to be brought into the castle, he says to the chief captain, “May I say something to you?” And he said, “Do you know Greek?” Are you not then the Egyptian, who before these days stirred up to sedition and led out into the wilderness the four thousand men of the Assassins?”
Paul then paused on the steps of the fortress and spoke to the chief captain in articulate and sophisticated Greek. He asked, “May I say something to you?” It was always wise to ask a senior soldier for permission to speak to him. But the chief captain was taken by surprise at his articulate and cultured Greek for he had gained quite another impression of Paul, (we must assume from the crowd. He had asked the crowd who and what he was). That some of the crowd should have said what they did serves to demonstrate how little the majority knew the truth about the man whose death they had been seeking, even the false ‘truth'. They were simply a lynch mob, carried away by excitement and prejudice.
So he asked in surprise, ‘Are you not then the Egyptian, who before these days stirred up to sedition and led out into the wilderness the four thousand men of the Assassins?' This was presumably what some in the crowds had told him. This character would later be spoken of by Josephus. It was a well known and infamous story. Three years prior to this an Egyptian Jew had claimed to be a prophet and had led a crowd of adherents out into the wilderness (patterning himself on Elijah and John the Baptiser), and then to the Mount of Olives, in order to Messianically attack Jerusalem declaring that the city walls would miraculously fall before him. He and his ‘assassins' had been beaten off by Felix with much bloodshed, although he had escaped. The assassins (sicarii - ‘dagger men') were strictly groups of Jews who carried daggers around with them hidden in their clothing so that at any opportunity that arose they could kill collaborators with the Romans, but the term no doubt became applied by the Romans to anyone who sought to slay them and their collaborators. After all they saw all who opposed them violently as little better than assassins.