“He has brought Greeks into the temple and defiled this holy place”
Men of Israel, help us! This is the man who teaches everywhere against our people and against our law and against this place. Furthermore, he has brought Greeks into the temple and defiled this holy place. (Acts 21:27–29 BSB)
What it sounds like today
A vague charge of sacrilege.
The cultural key
The temple's outer court was open to the nations, but a stone barrier (the soreg) ringed the inner courts, posted with inscriptions in Greek and Latin warning that any foreigner passing the barrier would bear responsibility for his own ensuing death: the one boundary where even Rome let Jerusalem enforce a death penalty. Two of those very inscription stones have been found (one complete, in 1871). The charge against Paul is a rumor built on a sighting: he had been seen in the city with Trophimus the Ephesian, and the crowd 'supposed' he had taken him past the barrier.
Recovered meaning
Paul is nearly lynched over the most literal wall in Judaism, on an unverified supposition. When he later writes that Christ 'has broken down the dividing wall of hostility' (Ephesians 2:14), readers who knew that barrier, and this riot, felt the sentence's full weight.