Acts 21:20

θεόν for κύριον with אABCEL. Vulg. ‘Deum.’

ἐν τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις with אBCE. Vulg. ‘in Judæis.’

20. ἐδόξαζον τὸν θεόν, they glorified God. They took up the strain of thanksgiving which had run through all the Apostle’s story. Nothing could show more clearly than such a result how little of himself, and how much of God, there had been in St Paul’s narrative.

εἶπάν τε αὐτῷ, and they said unto him. Their anxiety makes itself apparent at once, and we come here face to face with what must have been one of the greatest difficulties for the early Christians. Before Jerusalem was destroyed there must ever have been at that centre a party zealous for the Law, with whom labour among the Gentiles would find small favour.

θεωρεῖς, ἁδελφέ, thou seest, brother. The use of θεωρέω seems to imply that there had already been some opportunity for the Apostle to behold and estimate the character of a Christian gathering in Jerusalem. At this feast of Pentecost the Christians would have as much interest in a commemorative assembly as the Jews.

πόσαι μυριάδες, how many thousands. Literally ‘myriads.’ But the word is used indefinitely of a large number, just like our ‘thousand.’

εἰσὶν ἐν τοῖς Ἰουφαίοις τῶν πεπιστευκότων, there are among the Jews of them which have believed. These were persons who, as was not unlikely to be often the case, accepted Christianity as the supplement of Judaism, but made no break with their old faith, of the observances of which their life-long training had made them tenacious. To such men, as Christianity rested on the Old Testament Scripture, there would seem little need to make a rent between their old life and the new.

καὶ πάντες ζηλωταὶ τοῦ νόμου ὑπάρχουσιν, and they are all zealous for the Law, i.e. rigorous maintainers of all the ceremonial of the Mosaic code. Ζηλωταί was the name of a most rigid sect among the Jews, begun in the times of the Maccabees. It is used in a bad sense, ‘Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’ § 3.