Charles Ellicott Commentary Acts 21:38

"Art thou 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?" — Acts 21:38 (ASV)

Art not thou that Egyptian?—The Greek has an illative particle that is lacking in the English translation: Are you not then that Egyptian? This was the inference drawn by the chief captain from the fact that his prisoner spoke Greek. The Egyptian was a false prophet who, a short time before this, under the procuratorship of Felix, had led 30,000 men (?) to the Mount of Olives, promising them that they would see Jerusalem destroyed (Josephus, Antiquities 20.8.6; Wars 2.13.5).

His followers were routed by Felix, but he himself escaped; and the chief captain infers from the tumult raised by a Greek-speaking Jew that the Egyptian must have reappeared. Probably this was one of the vague reports in the confused clamor of the multitude. The words of the question have, however, been taken, on grammatical grounds, in a different sense: You are not, then, that Egyptian? as though his speaking Greek had changed the chiliarch’s previous impression. Against this, however, is the fact that an Egyptian Jew, coming from the very land of the Septuagint, would naturally speak Greek, and the inference that St. Paul was not the Egyptian because he knew that language would hardly be intelligible.

Four thousand men that were murderers.—Josephus, as has been said, gives a much larger number, but his statistics in such cases are never to be relied on. The word for murderer (sicarii, literally, dagger-bearers) was applied to the cut-throat bands who around this period infested nearly every part of Palestine, and who differed from the older robbers in being, like the Thugs in India, more systematically murderous (Josephus, Wars 2.13.3). In the siege of Jerusalem, their presence, sometimes in alliance with the more fanatical of the zealots, tended to aggravate all its horrors.