'Do you rob temples?' (2:22) and ancient law on temple robbery

Says Paul asks the one who abhors idols, ἱεροσυλεῖς (hierosyleis), "do you rob temples?" (2:22).

Greeks ranked temple theft among the worst crimes. At Athens one law covered temple robbers and traitors: trial, no burial in Attica and confiscation (Xenophon, Hell. 1.7.22). Plato's Laws would brand, scourge and expel a foreign or slave temple robber and execute a citizen (854d–e).

Israel was to burn the nations' images and not covet their silver or gold (Deut 7:25–26). Josephus gives the law as forbidding anyone to "steal what belongs to strange temples" (Ant. 4.207); elsewhere he says Jews may not mock or revile other peoples' gods (C. Ap. 2.237). At Ephesus the clerk said Paul's companions had not "robbed our temple" (Acts 19:37).

Josephus tells of a Jewish fugitive at Rome posing as a teacher of the laws of Moses who with three partners persuaded Fulvia, a noblewoman and proselyte, to send purple and gold to the Jerusalem temple, then kept it. When her husband told Tiberius, he banished the Jews from Rome; four thousand were sent to Sardinia (Ant. 18.81–84). Tacitus places the senate's measure against Egyptian and Jewish rites in AD 19 (Ann. 2.85), and Suetonius reports the expulsion (Tib. 36); neither mentions Fulvia. This was fraud, not robbery of a shrine.

Uncertain The exact sense is debated: robbing pagan shrines, trading in their valuables, or more broadly sacrilege against God. Set beside theft and adultery (2:21–22), a literal act is likely. Fulvia's case is possible background, not an identification.