Postcolonial Mission in Acts 16:8–10
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Between Asia and Europe
Postcolonial Mission in Acts 16:8–10
Readers in the Roman Empire viewed Judea, Syria, and Asia Minor as part of “Asia.” Those familiar with Greek conceptions of the world frequently envisioned Alexandria Troas or nearby historic Troy as the entry point to Asia from Europe. Despite Luke’s lack of explicit mention of continental divisions, his audience would likely recognize that the voyage from Troas to Macedonia signalled a transition from Asia to Europe. Less certain but nevertheless possible is an allusive reversal of the Macedonian Alexander’s invasion of Asia, initiated at Troy. On this reading, an Asian religious movement reverses colonial ambitions, bringing instead Jesus’s good news of peace.
Although some observers in recent centuries have misunderstood Christianity as a European movement, this misconception would have shocked first-century observers. Instead, they viewed Judea and Galilee (and its larger province of Syria), as well as what we call Asia Minor, as parts of Asia. Moreover, the one scene in which Acts could possibly describe the entrance of the gospel into Europe shows it originating from western Asia. The traditional division of continents has always been arbitrary (Greeks counted themselves as in Europe and distinguished themselves from “Asian” peoples to their east and later “Africa” to their south). Nevertheless, the division appeared significant to the many people in the Roman Empire who accepted Greek categories, and Greeks treated the Troad as their traditional entry point into Asia (the world to the west of the Greek homeland).
Although Luke does not explicitly use the language of Europe or Asia here, even a minimally culturally literate Greek audience would understand Troas’s strategic role for these boundaries. This site further evoked both the legendary conflict between the Achaians and Troy and the Persian conquests of Alexander, both of which Greeks conceptualized as “European” invasions of “Asia.” By contrast, Rome detested “Asian” religions like Judaism. It is thus possible that Luke’s original audience⁸⁹⁴ would envision a reverse movement of an Asian faith into Europe in what we might today call “anticolonial” terms.⁸⁹⁵ Although the Alexander allusion remains less than certain, for an audience in the Roman Empire the “Asian” geographic provenance of the gospel would be beyond dispute.
Troas’s Importance and Location
After a long journey from the interior of southern Asia Minor, Paul and his companions reach Alexandria Troas. Because Troas was not far from the coast, their “descent” to it in Acts 16:8 is aptly phrased.⁸⁹⁶ Although not yet certain of where to proceed (16:6–10), they presumably enter Troas deliberately (16:8). It had a large artificial harbor that made it strategic for travel between the east and the west.⁸⁹⁷ This strategic location suggests that Paul and Silas may have hoped to sail from there; it was not likely a destination reached merely accidentally from their previous locations (16:6–8).⁸⁹⁸ That is, the missionaries probably did not intend Troas as their final stop.
Although the legendary reputation of nearby Troy (Ilium) still overshadowed the fame of Alexandria Troas, the latter was significant in its own right. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, Alexandria Troas constituted the largest city in the Troad, the region of Troy.⁸⁹⁹ Most of the city remains unexcavated, but it is thought to cover over 1,000 acres, with ancient walls once five miles around.⁹⁰⁰ The limited archaeological data support the closeness of Strabo’s estimate for the walls, and some, estimating 100 persons per acre, have surmised 100,000 inhabitants. This estimate may well be too high, but clearly it was a significant city.⁹⁰¹
Although the city bore the name “Alexandria” after its founding in the fourth century BCE, the emperor Augustus officially titled it “Colonia Augusta Troas” or “Colonia Augusta Troadensium” (CIL 3.39),⁹⁰² recalling the grandeur of its past. “Troas” was thus Alexandria Troas’s preferred official title in this period.
Troas’s Association with Troy
When an ancient audience heard of Paul’s stay in Troas, they would recall earlier Troy. Although the towns were often confused in antiquity, the Roman colony of Troas was distinct from the site of ancient Troy, still inhabited as the town of Ilium. Colin Hemer notes that Troas could never “escape the historic and civic prestige of Ilium” to the north, “which continued to hold the primacy in a religious league of confederate cities.”⁹⁰³
Educated persons recognized that Ilium, not Alexandria Troas, was the site of Homer’s tales (Pliny N.H. 5.33.315). Ilium itself was not small. Archaeologists have observed 47 blocks of Roman Ilium, most of them 360 Roman feet north-south by 180 Roman feet east-west. Nevertheless, the ties between the two “Troys” were significant; for example, over two centuries earlier (c. 216 BCE), Troas sent a relief force of 4,000 that delivered Ilium from the attacking Gauls.⁹⁰⁴
Despite its distance of ten or fifteen miles south-southwest from Homer’s Troy,⁹⁰⁵ the continuity between later Troas and its nearby, famous past endured in popular thought.⁹⁰⁶ This Roman colony held the name precisely to recall this past. In fact, Rome traced its founding to Trojans (especially in Virgil’s Aeneid), and some cities in Phrygia claimed that Phrygian heroes in the Trojan War had founded them.⁹⁰⁷ Troas would naturally evoke the same connection, especially for an audience outside the Troad. Some believed that the fallen heroes of the Trojan War still lived in the area of Troy.⁹⁰⁸
Greeks recognized Troy as the subject of their most famous and widely read epic, the Iliad,⁹⁰⁹ and allusions to the story pervaded Greek literature.⁹¹⁰ Well over a millennium after the purported time of its most renowned fall, educated people at banquets might take turns reciting names of Troy’s final leaders (Athenaeus Deipn. 10.457F); those who thought of Troy in their own day typically associated it with its past suffering (Athenaeus Deipn. 8.351a).⁹¹¹ Linked with the famous past, both Alexandria Troas and Troy remained popular destinations for ancient tourism.⁹¹²
Given the ancient Greek association of the Troad with the Greek point of entry into Asia, Greeks familiar with the Iliad (their most popular work) and the famous conquest of Asia by Alexander of Macedon (treated below) would view this as a strategic geographic point in the narrative.⁹¹³ But whereas the traditional Greek story line was a military invasion of Asia (under Alexander spreading Greek civilization),⁹¹⁴ here heralds bring to Europe what would be perceived as an Asian faith.
The Troad, Europe, and Asia
One nuance associated with Troy was that it guarded the Hellespont, since at least Homeric times the Greek boundary between Asia and Europe (e.g., Varro 7.2.21).⁹¹⁵ Greeks crossed via the Hellespont into “Asia” (e.g., Polybius 4.46.1), as Persians did into “Europe” (Lysias Or. 2.28, §193). But whereas Greeks or hellenized Macedonians invaded Asia in the eras of the Iliad and of Alexander,⁹¹⁶ now the gospel comes from Asia to Greece, Macedonia, and the rest of Europe. Greek and Roman literature normally portray movements from Europe to Asia as more positive than the reverse; Jewish people, however, would think differently, as would those adopted into and committed to a Jewish movement.
Greeks and Romans viewed the legendary Trojan War as a clash between Europe and Asia.⁹¹⁷ Thus, for example, a Roman tragedy could have a Trojan lament the loss of “mighty Asia’s” pillar.⁹¹⁸ For some, this war became a prototype of the continuing clash between Greek and eastern cultures.⁹¹⁹
In more recent history, Greek intellectuals similarly viewed Alexander’s crossing the Hellespont as marking his entrance into Asia from Europe.⁹²⁰ Thus the war between Alexander and Persia was between “Europe” and “Asia,”⁹²¹ and some alleged that Alexander struck his spear into the ground to claim Asia as his conquest (Ps.-Callisthenes Alex. 1.28). Thus Roman observers claimed that Alexander conquered Asia but never attempted to conquer Europe (including Italy; Livy 9.16.19), or noted that the Macedonian empire controlled large parts of Europe and most of Asia in its heyday (Livy 31.1.7).⁹²² Some Greeks viewed Alexander’s invasion of “Asia” against the Persians as a deliberate reminiscence of Achilles’s fight against Troy. Tradition insisted that Alexander himself (who viewed himself as a second Achilles) recalled this comparison, invoking the spirit of Achilles against the Persians.⁹²³ “Alexandria” Troas bore Alexander’s name (although Luke omits “Alexandria”), and tradition claimed that the city was founded in 334 BCE, i.e., during his lifetime.⁹²⁴
Greeks and Romans counted Persia as “Asia,”⁹²⁵ Persian attacks on Greece as Asian designs on Europe,⁹²⁶ and their defeats after invading Greece as Europe’s conquest of Asia.⁹²⁷ Because Greeks and Romans often encountered Asian kingdoms in periods of the latter’s weakness, Asia sometimes received the unfair caricature⁹²⁸ of cowardice in contrast to Europe and Africa, which they claimed proved harder to subdue (Appian Hist. rom. pref. 9).⁹²⁹ (Romans knew better than to believe the caricature when applying it to their dreaded Parthian rivals, however.)⁹³⁰ Yet when Gauls crossed the Hellespont to invade the Troad, Alexandria Troas’s inhabitants fought back (Polybius 5.111.1–7), providing a good warning to Europe’s “barbarians” not to invade “Asia” too eagerly (5.111.7).
Culturally, Asia Minor was increasingly Hellenized and Romanized; but symbolically, its heritage, epitomized especially by Troy and the wider ancient empire of Persia, could be treated differently. After the hellenistic cultural revival of the second century, those who wove legends reported the enduring hatred toward Troy from the Greek hero Achilles’s ghost, still hovering near Troy (Philostratus V.A. 4.11; Hrk. 56.6–10) and the continuing Greek perception that Troy was hostile territory (Philostratus Hrk. 53.13).⁹³¹ Scholars have argued that the location of the Protesilaos cult on the Hellespont suited that hero’s role of avenger of non-Greek incursions against Greeks, guarding Europe from barbarian Asia.⁹³²
Between Asia and Europe?
Some doubt that we should overemphasize the division between Asia and “Europe” here, since the Greek language was dominant in both Macedonia and most of urban Asia Minor, and Philippi and Troas were both Roman colonies.⁹³³ A stronger reason to doubt the distinction’s relevance here is that Luke does not mention it; the context applies the title “Asia” only to the Roman province in the narrowest sense (16:6), and the title “Europe” appears nowhere in the New Testament.⁹³⁴
We should also keep in mind the serious danger of understanding these categories anachronistically. For example, Asia Minor and Greece belonged to the shared cultural sphere of the Hellenistic fusion of Greek and “Asian” civilizations; northern Europe, by contrast, was entirely outside the Hellenistic cultural sphere (though not unknown to them), like China or African Meroë. (In fact, northern Europe, such as Germany, was in a sense less in their sphere of valued trade than India⁹³⁵ and China,⁹³⁶ though less distant and affording more direct contact.)⁹³⁷ Cultural spheres varied from one period to another, and cannot be identified with traditional continental divisions, which simply reflect ancient Greek geographic prejudices.⁹³⁸ The ancient Jewish population, central to the biblical story, by this period spanned both Roman and Parthian empires, thoroughly ignoring old Greek categories.
Having acknowledged these caveats, however, it remains the case that most Roman and urban eastern Mediterranean audiences would readily recognize the symbolic historic division between civilizations represented by the movement from Troas to Macedonia. Although the phrase “Asia” by itself in 16:6 does not imply “Europe” as a contrast,⁹³⁹ I suspect that few members of Luke’s audience, familiar with the most prominent stories of Greek culture, would fail to think of Asia and Europe when hearing of Troas and Macedonia in 16:8–9.
That Luke’s culturally literate ideal audience would know such divisions is certain. Greeks divided the world into Asia (the civilizations to their east with which they had once fought bitter conflicts), Europe, and often (on the south of the Mediterranean sea) Africa; the distinction continued in later literature.⁹⁴⁰ Some Greeks even divided the world into just Europe and Asia, including Africa in Europe.⁹⁴¹ Because of the subjects addressed by most writers, the division between Europe and Asia proved the most essential one in most texts.⁹⁴² Some treated this distinction as if it were as pervasive as that between Greek and barbarian (e.g., Ps.-Dionysius Hal. Epid. 3.268) or between heaven and earth (Varro Latin Language 5.5.31). The distinction was geographic (purely in terms of historic perceptions), not cultural; thus Asia included the cities that were traditionally Athenian colonies in Asia Minor, though Greece was part of Europe.⁹⁴³ There can thus be no question that audiences in the Roman Empire regarded Judea as part of Asia.
Romans, like Greeks, expressed both grudging respect for Asia (notably Parthia,⁹⁴⁴ but also some great civilizations beyond)⁹⁴⁵ and irrational xenophobia (such as Juvenal’s oft-noted comparison of eastern “cults” like Judaism with the refuse of the Syrian river Orontes).⁹⁴⁶ As one source points out, Romans expressed their own “Eurocentric chauvinism,” as when Pliny the Elder calls Europe conqueror of the earth and “by far the loveliest portion of the earth” (N.H. 3.1.5).⁹⁴⁷ Since they claimed descent from Troy, however, they owed some respect to their own “Asian” heritage.
Asia’s Gift to Europe
Luke cannot readily share the above-mentioned prejudices of some of his Greek and Roman contemporaries, because the faith he recounts would be viewed by his audience as Asian.⁹⁴⁸ Whatever his own geographic location and origin, the earliest Christian movement to which he belonged was numerically stronger in Asia than in Europe. Luke-Acts reports the story of Jesus in Asia; uses Septuagintal Greek; and otherwise would appear to Hellenistic historiographers as “Asian” historiography, just as Josephus did.⁹⁴⁹
Acts thus in a sense narrates the beginning of what some could have viewed as an Asian movement’s (spiritual) “conquest” or subversion in the reverse direction. Jews were considered Asian; the gospel coming from Asia to Europe reversed the Greek invasions of Troy and, more recently, Alexander’s invasion of Persia.⁹⁵⁰ But Asia’s gift of the gospel to Europe was more benevolent in this case than Hellenization or Roman conquest—though many traditional Greeks and Romans would demur. Rome had made peace with Hellenization but a later writer there could, as we have noted, compare eastern “cults” to Syrian refuse pouring into the Tiber (Juvenal Sat. 3.62). At the same time, those who lashed out against “eastern” customs in Rome often did so precisely in reaction against other Romans who embraced such customs.⁹⁵¹
That Paul and Silas voyage in 16:10–12 from Troas to Macedonia reinforces the possibility that some of Luke’s audience might hear a contrast with Alexander, the Macedonian who invaded “Asia” at Troy (see comment above). Of course, people sailed from Troas to Macedonia and the reverse on a regular basis (e.g., Acts 20:5–6), but in view of continental boundaries that most envisioned, this juncture in Luke’s narrative is significant. Luke’s first volume is framed by scenes in Jerusalem’s temple (Luke 1:5–22; 24:52–53), but his second volume is driven by the movement from Jerusalem (Acts 1—7) to Rome (28:16–31). The voyage from the Roman colony of Troas to Macedonia would bring them to the Via Egnatia, a Roman road that constituted a major link between Italy and Asia Minor in the Roman period.⁹⁵² Many scholars believe that by starting on the Via Egnatia, Paul was already signaling his interest in Rome,⁹⁵³ though conflict in Thessalonica may turn him southward (17:10).
Moreover, from Luke’s salvation-historical perspective, the gospel’s spread was even more significant for history than Alexander’s conquests and cultural fusion. Passing from Troas to Macedonia here is thus no mere customary voyage. Given the movement of the narrative as a whole and (the epic dimension of that movement), this transition might evoke Alexander in reverse. It probably evokes at least the traditional divide between continents, showing that this “Asian” faith can reach all cultures.
One may plausibly resist all of these conclusions by pointing out that Luke does not explicitly mention this division; certainly he could have made such assumptions more explicit if they were part of his meaning. In this case, one might infer that Luke does not regard continental divisions as significant. At the very least, however, it is certain that many gentiles who heard Acts would have heard the narrative’s movement the way they understood other movements from Asia (whether the “cult” of Cybele or Judaism), as that of an Asian faith establishing itself in Europe.
Conclusion
A first-century audience in the Roman Empire would recognize in Acts 16:8–10 the call of Asian believers to spread Jesus’s message in Europe. Luke’s larger narrative includes all three continents, noting the initial foray of the gospel into Africa (Acts 8:26–40, recounting the first gentile Christian) and later into Europe, toward the heart of the Roman Empire. Luke’s audience would not await a signal of the gospel’s movement to Asia, however, because his original audience recognized the place of its beginnings (that dominate all of Luke’s first and a substantial part of his second volumes) as being in “Asia.”
Not all of my suggestions in this essay are of equal weight. That Luke’s audience understood Jesus’s movement and the apostolic mission as beginning in Asia is certain. That Luke envisioned the movement from Troas to Macedonia as a transition from Asia to Europe I regard as very likely, though because he is not more explicit, I can be less certain how much he makes of this. Finally, I believe it possible and even fairly likely that much of Luke’s audience could hear a reversal of Alexander’s Macedonian invasion of Asia in this narrative. Because Luke does not evoke that history more clearly (in contrast to his often explicit biblical allusions), it is uncertain to what degree Luke himself intended such an allusion. Nevertheless, ancient narratives evoked such history frequently enough to suggest the plausibility of this final point and at least this reception among some real first-century hearers. It may also invite further exploration from some scholars interested in the question.