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Journey of St. Paul
Antioch on Orontes, Ephesus, and Corinth, cities
second in wealth and importance in the Roman Empire only to Alexandria in
Egypt and to Rome, are inseparably linked with the early history of
Christianity. According to the information supplied by Acts it was in
Antioch that the word 'Christians' was first used to refer to the
adherents to the new religion.
Yet it was not only in these great cities that Christianity found
adherents, for it gathered them also in far distant towns and communities
of Anatolia, Macedonia and Greece. From the Levant through the uplands of
the Taurus and to the well settled valleys of western Anatolia, cities to
the other side of the Aegean, to all these places, on foot or riding or by
slow moving ships, St. Paul, the tireless apostle, carried the Gospel.
At each place he gathered into fellowships of churches men and women, Jews
and Gentiles, rich and poor, who had accepted the message and he nurtured
the faithful, both by his presence and his letters. Although born as a
movement within Judaism, it was in Anatolia and the immediate lands on the
other side of the Aegean that the Gospel first took root, largely as a
result of St. Paul's missionary work in about the middle of the first
century. It was in these countries that Christianity developed away from
its origins in Palestine to become a religion of the Greco-Roman world,
and ultimately of the present.
St. Paul's journeys through Anatolia, Macedonia and Greece are recorded in
the second and longer part of the Ads of the Apostles, written in Greek by
the evangelist Luke, author of the Third Gospel perhaps a few decades
after the martyrdom of St. Paul. A sequel to his Gospel, Acts continues
Luke's history of Christian origins and tells us the story of the early
church and how it spread from Jews to Gentiles, largely through the
efforts of St. Paul. In regard to the subject matter of this book the
absolute chronology of these journeys and their length are circumstantial.
The works of various Greek, Roman and Jewish authors and other
contemporary sources, as well as discoveries in archaeology, help to shed
light on this period and on the world in which St. Paul traveled. St.
Paul's journeys fall into the history of the Greco-Roman world when the
spark of the Hellenistic period had come to an end. The Roman overtake of
Macedonia, Greece, Anatolia and the eastern Mediterranean was followed by
the economic collapse of these countries because of the exploitation of
Roman tax farmers (Mt 11.19 and others) and the harshness of Roman laws of
debt. In these countries the first century BCE is marked by other
disasters brought by the Mithradatic wars, the feud between Pompey and
Julius Caesar, the wars between the latter's murderers Brutus and Cassius
and his avengers Octavian (later Augustus) and Mark Antony, and finally
between the avengers themselves.
Big earthquakes may be added to these conflicts. Still, beginning with
Julius Caesar the economic conditions of the Roman provinces saw a
relative rehabilitation which was best reflected in the architecture of
big cities. Thus St. Paul could see what had been left from the
Hellenistic age and what was built at the time of the early Roman rulers:
Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius and Nero, and by Herod the Great in
the East.
St. Paul's letters do not give any hint about the routes that he followed
during his journeys. Apart from Acts 17.1 where two stations on the Via
Egnatia, and 28: 15 two more on the Via Appia are mentioned we are not
informed about the roads the apostle traveled. At some sites that St. Paul
should have visited there has been little or no excavation, and in towns
and cities that have been continuously inhabited there is sometimes
virtually nothing to be seen, as the remains of earlier ages have either
disappeared or lie beneath the existing structures.
Nevertheless, in one form or another, be it a stretch of Roman road and a
milestone, or the remains of a synagogue, a bridge still in use after some
two millennia, or a dedication to Artemis or Hermes, such evidence can
help us to understand something of the Greco-Roman world in which St. Paul
traveled and make so-called educated guesses about St. Paul's routes.
Ultimately Anatolia, Macedonia and Greece became the most Christianized
region in the Roman Empire and it was at the middle point of these
countries, on the Bosphorus, at Byzantium that the victory of St. Paul's
missions was officially acknowledged by Constantine the Great, who would
found his new and Christian capital as New Rome and dedicate it in 330.
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