About St. Paul The Missionary Journeys of St. Paul
Journeys 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.
Journeys of St. Paul
About St. Paul
Traveling in St. Pauls Time
City of St. Paul
Antioch on the Orontes
Seleucia Pieria
First Journey
Ministry in Antioch - Orontes
Second Journey
Third Journey
Arrest and Imprisonment
Journey to Rome
Story of Paul and Thecla
St. Paul's Letters