Paul's journeys

Paul travelled a road network he did not build. The Via Egnatia ran from the Adriatic across Macedonia to Byzantium, and the second journey's run from Philippi to Amphipolis to Apollonia to Thessalonica (Acts 17:1) is simply the traveller working westward along it, stopping where the road stopped. The cities he stayed in are almost all Roman colonies, provincial capitals or road junctions. Places of no traffic get no visit.

At sea he was ruled by the season. Roman shipping largely shut down from November to March, and the voyage to Rome runs aground precisely because the question of where to spend the winter was decided badly. Luke notes the fast had already gone by (Acts 27:9), which puts them in late September or October, already late.

He also worked to a pattern: the synagogue first, then the wider city. It gave him a hearing among people who already knew the scriptures, and it is why the pattern of a divided synagogue followed by a riot repeats from Pisidian Antioch to Thessalonica. Athens is the visible exception, where he starts from an altar to an unknown god and quotes Greek poets instead (Acts 17:22-28).

Pick a voyage and it draws itself. Every stop is numbered in the order Acts gives it, and touching one opens what happened there with the verse. A place visited twice carries both its numbers, which is how the first journey's out-and-back shows itself.

Want to build them from memory instead? Play the route game.

Almost every date in Paul's life is worked out from a single inscription. A stone found at Delphi records a letter from the emperor Claudius and names Gallio as proconsul of Achaia, which places his one year term around AD 51 or 52. Acts has Paul brought before Gallio at Corinth (Acts 18:12-17), so the eighteen months in Corinth can be pinned, and every other journey counted forward and backward from there. When you see confident years attached to these voyages, that stone is usually underneath them.

Who were the Galatians? Paul wrote a letter to churches in Galatia, and there are two candidates. The southern view identifies them with Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, the towns of the first journey, which lay in the Roman province of Galatia. The northern view places them in ethnic Galatia further north, territory Acts never says he evangelised. The southern reading allows an early date for Galatians, possibly before the council of Acts 15, which affects how the letter and the council relate. The northern reading requires a later date. Both are held by serious readers, and the letter itself names no city.

How many journeys were there? Three plus a voyage to Rome is the conventional count, but it is a later editorial scheme rather than Luke's. Acts does not number them, and the divisions are drawn at the points where Paul returns to Antioch. The pastoral letters mention movements that do not fit anywhere in Acts, including a visit to Crete (Titus 1:5) and a plan to winter at Nicopolis (Titus 3:12). Readers who take those letters as straightforwardly Pauline generally conclude there was a release from the Roman imprisonment and further travel. Readers who date the letters later do not. Acts itself simply stops with Paul under guard for two years (Acts 28:30-31) and says nothing about how it ended.

Where was Derbe, and where was Fair Havens? Most of the great cities are excavated and certain. Ephesus, Philippi, Corinth and Pisidian Antioch can be walked today. A handful of the smaller stops rest on identifications that are probable rather than proven, and this study marks them. Lystra and Derbe are placed from inscriptions found at or near the mounds now proposed for them.

Who is the we? From (Acts 16:10) the narration changes to the first person in several stretches, and changes back. The traditional reading is that the author joined the party at Troas and is reporting what he saw. Others have proposed a travel diary used as a source, or a literary convention of sea voyage narration. The passages themselves are unusually detailed about ships, soundings and cargo.

The first journey is a loop that goes out and comes back through every town, including the ones where he had just been driven out. The second breaks the pattern by crossing water into Europe after being blocked twice from where he intended to go (Acts 16:6-8). The third barely moves: about three years in one city, and Luke says all who lived in Asia heard the word (Acts 19:10), which is what happens when you stop travelling and let a provincial capital do the work. The fourth is not a mission at all. It is a prisoner transport, and the route is chosen by a centurion and then by a storm.

One more thing worth seeing drawn: he keeps sailing past places he could have visited. At Miletus he sends for the Ephesian elders rather than going the thirty miles to Ephesus (Acts 20:16-17), because he wanted to reach Jerusalem by Pentecost. The map makes that decision visible in a way the text alone does not.