CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 26
Ephesus: Open Door and Many Adversaries
1. Paul comes to Ephesus
After his short visit to palestine and syria in the spring of a.d. 52, Paul made his way back to Ephesus by land. This time no obstacles or prophetic prohibitions prevented him from completing his westward journey through Asia Minor. On the way he is said to have passed through “the Galatic region and Phrygia”, but as nothing is said of his undertaking evangelism there but only of his “strengthening all the disciples” (Acts 18:23), the area indicated is probably much the same as that which he traversed with Silas and Timothy on the earlier occasion, called “the Phrygian and Galatic region” in Acts 16:6. Then he went on to Ephesus by way of the “upper country” (Acts 19:1), which may mean that, instead of taking the main road by the Lycus and Maeander valleys, he travelled by a more northerly road and approached Ephesus from the north side of Mount Messogis (modern Aydin Dǎglari).1 (Another suggestion is that the expression simply refers to the hinterland of Ephesus, as when we say “up country”.)2
The province of Asia, as has been mentioned already, was formed from the kingdom of Pergamum when Attalus III died in 133 B.C. and left his territory to the senate and people of Rome. It comprised the regions of Mysia, Lydia, Caria, Lycia and Western Phrygia. On its coast and off-shore islands there had been Ionian Greek settlements from time immemorial.3 In the first half of the sixth century B.C. the mainland settlements were incorporated by Croesus into his expanding kingdom of Lydia: when he was overthrown by Cyrus in 546 B.C. they passed under Persian control. After an abortive revolt in 498 B.C., they regained their liberty for some decades following the repulse of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480–479 B.C., but reverted to Persian rule by the King’s Peace of 387 B.C.4 They were liberated again by Alexander in 334 B.C. and after his death were ruled by one or another of the succession dynasties: the chief cities, however, enjoyed a considerable measure of civic autonomy, and continued to do so under the Romans.
Of these Ionian settlements the most illustrious was Ephesus, at the mouth of the Caÿster (modern Küçük Menderes). There had been a Carian settlement here before the Ionians came, devoted to the cult of the great Anatolian mother-goddess in her local manifestation.5 The Ionian colonists intermingled with their Carian predecessors, and shared in the worship of the great goddess. Her name Artemis is pre-Greek. She first appears in Greek literature as mistress and protectress of wild life;6 in Greece proper she was worshipped as the virgin-huntress. The temple of Artemis at Ephesus housed the many-breasted image of the goddess, which was believed to have “fallen from the sky” (Acts 19:35) and to be therefore of divine workmanship. An earlier temple was burned down in 356 B.C.—on the night, it was said, when Alexander the Great was born—by a young man who explained that he had done this to perpetuate his name in history. It must be confessed that he succeeded in his aim; his name, Herostratus, is known to us solely for this act of arson.7 A new temple, more magnificent than the one it replaced, was built soon afterwards and ranked as one of the seven wonders of the world. The city prided itself on its designation “Temple Warden (neōkoros) of Artemis”;8 and on the fact that the cult of the great goddess had spread out into the whole Greek world and even beyond its frontiers: the silversmith Demetrius might well speak of her as worshipped by “all Asia and the world” (Acts 19:27).9 Magnificent as the temple was—four times as large as the Parthenon in Athens, supported by 127 columns, each of them sixty feet high, and adorned by Praxiteles and other great sculptors of antiquity10—it has almost completely disappeared; only its foundations remain, and these were located with difficulty by J. T. Wood in 1869 in a marsh at the foot of the hill of Ayasoluk (now Selçuk).11
The chief remains of Hellenistic and Roman Ephesus stand about a mile and a half south and south-west of the temple site. Although the city was a seaport in New Testament times, it now stands seven miles inland because of the silt carried down by the Caÿster. From the top of the theatre one can still discern the outline of the ancient harbour (rather as in aerial photography), now a marshy waste at the end of the Arcadian Way.12 The theatre, built into the western slope of Mount Pion (Panayirdaǧ) in the city centre, is reckoned to have accommodated over 25,000 people.
Pergamum remained the titular capital of the province, as it had been of the kingdom of the Attalids, but Ephesus was the greatest and most populous city—the greatest trading centre, says Strabo, of all the Asian cities west of the Taurus.13 Ephesus, Pergamum and the other Greek city–states of the province formed a confederation (the koinon of Asia); the representatives of the cities who served on its council were known as the Asiarchs. The Roman administration of the province exercised its authority through regular assizes (agoraioi) held in nine or more of the cities and presided over by the proconsul. Liaison was maintained between the municipality and the provincial government by the city secretary (grammateus) or chief executive officer.
To this great city, then, Paul came in the late summer of A.D. 52 and stayed there for the best part of three years, directing the evangelization of Ephesus itself and of the province as a whole. Plainly he was assisted in this work by a number of colleagues—like Epaphras, who evangelized the Phrygian cities of the Lycus valley (Colossae, Laodicea and Hierapolis)14—and so effectively did they work that, as Luke puts it, “all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord, both Jews and Greeks” (Acts 19:10). Indeed, the Christian history of the area continued unbroken from those years until the Graeco-Turkish exchange of populations in 1923.
2. Luke’s “pictures” of Paul in Ephesus
Luke does not appear to have been with Paul at any point during his Ephesian ministry, and we have no connected account of these years, for all their importance in the expansion of the Gentile mission. Nor have we any correspondence between Paul and his converts at Ephesus which could help us to reconstruct his experiences with them as the Corinthian letters help us to reconstruct his experiences with the church of Corinth. But the vividness of some of the Ephesian episodes reported by Luke has suggested to many readers that he was indebted to eyewitness reports of these.15
A New Testament scholar of the present day has compared Luke’s literary style to “a lecture with lantern-slides; the pictures are shown one after another illustrating the story the lecturer wants to tell while he makes the transition from one plate to another by some general remarks”.16 Nowhere in Acts is this analogy more apt than in the account of Paul’s Ephesian ministry (Acts 19:1–41).
(a) Disciples at Ephesus. The first of these “pictures” has as its subject Paul’s encounter, shortly after his arrival in Ephesus, with a dozen men whom Luke calls “disciples” (Acts 19:1–7). When he uses the term “disciples” in this absolute way, Luke normally means “disciples of Jesus”; that this is what these men were is implied by the question which Paul put to them: “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?” He assumed that they were believers—believers in Jesus, that is to say—but suspected that there was something deficient in their Christian experience, and discovered that they knew nothing of the Holy Spirit. Further inquiry showed that the only baptism of which they knew was John’s: in this they resembled Apollos. Perhaps they acquired such knowledge of the Way as they possessed from some person or persons who, like Apollos, added an acquaintance with the story of Jesus to an initial reception of John’s baptism. It was not necessarily in Ephesus that they had been baptized: John’s followers may conceivably have carried his teaching as far north as Asia Minor, but these disciples could have come in touch with his teaching and baptism elsewhere, possibly in Palestine. We are reminded once more of the scantiness of our knowledge of the dissemination of the gospel in various forms from its homeland to other regions.
Paul impressed on these disciples the preparatory character of John’s ministry. Their understanding of John’s ministry itself was defective if they did not know of his testimony to the one who was to come after him and administer baptism with the Holy Spirit. Apollos had made what could be recognized as a Christian commitment, and Luke’s statement that he was “fervent in spirit” (Acts 18:25) may mean that he was “bubbling over with the Spirit”17—an experience far exceeding anything that these disciples knew. Accordingly Paul had them baptized “into the name of the Lord Jesus” and laid his hands on them, whereupon they received the Spirit and gave audible evidence of their doing so by glossolalia and prophecy. This is the only instance of re-baptism in the New Testament: there is no suggestion that this had been required of Apollos. The apostles themselves and their fellow-disciples, some of whom had received John’s baptism, had no need to be baptized afresh because the Spirit came upon them spontaneously at Pentecost, but baptism with the imposition of hands was apparently judged necessary to induce the pentecostal experience in these disciples of Ephesus. Their baptism betokened their full and intelligent commitment to the Christ whose significance was made plain to them by Paul. Paul, it has been validly pointed out, “was one of the greatest assets” for the Jerusalem church,18 for either by his personal action (as here) or under his influence (as when Priscilla and Aquila instructed Apollos) versions of the gospel which were defective by Jerusalem standards were brought into conformity with the line maintained in common by Paul and the leaders of the mother-church.
(b) Transference to the lecture-hall of Tyrannus. Luke’s second “picture” is of Paul’s expulsion from the synagogue after enjoying its hospitality for three months. The synagogue authorities in Ephesus appear to have accommodated him rather longer than did their colleagues in most other cities visited by Paul. In Ephesus, indeed, the opposition to Paul’s “arguing and pleading about the kingdom of God” in the synagogue is not said to have come from the authorities themselves but from some unspecified persons who “were stubborn and disbelieved, speaking evil of the Way before the congregation”19 (Acts 19:8f.). The opposition, at any rate, was sufficiently powerful and vocal to make Paul withdraw from the synagogue. He took his converts and fellow-Christians with him, and they found another meeting-place in the lecture-hall of one Tyrannus. It may be wondered whether it was his parents or his pupils who first called him Tyrannus. His pupils evidently attended his lectures in the cooler hours of the day and then teacher and pupils alike went home towards noon for their siesta; according to the Western text of Acts 19:9 it was “from the fifth hour to the tenth”—from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.—that Paul had the use of his hall and held public debate there. Whatever be the textual basis for the Western reading, the statement is quite probable, although it says much for the staying-power of Paul’s hearers as well as of Paul himself if they frequented the lecture-hall daily during the heat of the day for two years. Paul for his part seems to have spent the early morning, and possibly the evening, in manual labour: “these hands”, he later reminds the elders of the Ephesian church, “ministered to my necessities, and to those who were with me” (Acts 20:34).
(c) Magical arts. In Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Antipholus of Syracuse comes to Ephesus and refers to the city’s reputation as a centre for the learning and practice of magical arts:
They say this town is full of cozenage,
As, nimble jugglers that deceive the eye,
Dark-working sorcerers that change the mind,
Soul-killing witches that deform the body,
Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks,
And many such-like liberties of sin.20
Its reputation in this respect is indicated by the fact that the phrase “Ephesian writings” (Ephesia grammata)21 was commonly used in antiquity for documents containing spells and formulae like the lengthy magical papyri in the London, Paris and Leiden collections or small amulets (like the mottoes in Christmas crackers) to be rolled up and placed in small cylinders or lockets worn round the neck or elsewhere about the person.22 One of the latter, in the Princeton University collection of papyri, begins with an odd series of letters arranged in a special pattern:
—after which comes the petition: “Sovereign and good angels, deliver … the son of Sophia from the fever which has him in its grip, this present day, this very hour, now now, quickly quickly.”23 The carefully arranged pattern with which the amulet begins may represent an effort to express the name of some divinity or demon. The great magical papyri are full of such real or imagined names. These documents have come down to us from all over the Near East, but Ephesus was specially renowned for them.
It was not unnatural that in such a setting Paul himself should be regarded as a magician of sorts: kerchiefs and aprons which he wore while engaged in manual labour were taken and applied to various sick and possessed people and proved remarkably beneficial. The virtue, naturally, did not reside in the pieces of cloth or leather but in the faith of those who used them as medicaments. Others looked upon the name of Jesus, so frequently on Paul’s lips, as a potent spell, and tried to invoke it as such. The Paris magical papyrus contains such an invocation, “I adjure you by Jesus the god of the Hebrews”,24 and we have evidence of the similar use of other Jewish names, including the divine names Sabaoth, Iao and Iabe.
The last two are attempts at reproducing the ineffable name of the God of Israel. A name of which very few knew the pronunciation, or were permitted to utter it if they did, was by all the standards of magic a name of great power. It was believed that one of the few men to possess the secret was the Jewish high priest, who uttered it when he laid the people’s sins on the head of the scapegoat in the court of the Jerusalem temple on the annual day of atonement.25 It is not surprising then that some strolling Jewish exorcists should give themselves out as members of a high-priestly family. Luke mentions the seven sons of Sceva, billed as a “Jewish high priest”, who undertook to exorcize a demon with the words: “I exorcize you by Jesus whom Paul proclaims” (Acts 19:13 f.). But the demon-possessed man turned on them with such ferocity that they counted themselves fortunate to escape with their lives. In the eyes of the public this served only to emphasize the power of the name of Jesus: it was too dangerous a name to be invoked by any who did not know the right way to use it. In no other city which figures in Luke’s narrative could such an incident seem so natural as in Ephesus.
But the power of the name of Jesus was manifested in the way of which Paul approved when several practitioners of magic were converted to Christianity and renounced their magical arts. They gave practical proof of the change which they had experienced by publicly divulging their secret spells (thus depriving them of their potency) and burning their papyrus scrolls, the value of which was estimated at 50,000 drachmae.
(d) Demonstration in the theatre. The most vivid of all the Ephesian episodes reported by Luke describes the riotous assembly in the great theatre of the city. The success of Paul’s evangelistic activity meant a diminution in the number of worshippers of the great goddess Artemis, and a consequent diminution in the income of those craftsmen who depended heavily on the Artemis cult for the sale of their wares. Among these craftsmen the silver-smiths held a leading place. The president of the guild of silversmiths at Ephesus, Demetrius by name, called a meeting of his fellow-craftsmen and set before them the seriousness of the situation on the religious and economic planes alike. Demetrius and his colleagues, says Luke, found a ready sale for “silver shrines of Artemis”—miniature sanctuaries representing the goddess (perhaps with her attendant lions) in a niche: her devotees would purchase these and dedicate them in the temple. No silver miniatures of this kind have survived, although silver replicas of her image and terra-cotta models of her temple are known. An inscription of A.D. 104, half a century later than the present incident, tells how a Roman official presented a silver image of Artemis and other statues to be set up in the theatre.26 The expression used by Luke of Demetrius is similar to the designation neōpoios, literally “shrine-maker”, which was actually used of a member of the temple vestry (which seems to have comprised twelve men).27 Demetrius may have been one of the goddess’s vestrymen, then, as well as president of the local guild of silversmiths.
Filled with a sense of outrage at the indignity inflicted on the great goddess by these foreign preachers, the silversmiths and their associates raised the cult-cry, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”28 Their indignation spread to the populace, who rushed to the theatre and demonstrated there. They laid hands on two of Paul’s companions, Gaius and Aristarchus, and dragged them to the theatre with them.29 Paul himself was about to go there too and do what he could to appease the crowd, but some of the Asiarchs of Ephesus who were well-disposed to him warned him to do no such thing.
The Jews of Ephesus felt very uneasy about the turn of events. Although they had no part in Paul’s activity, it was well known that they were no believers in Artemis, and a pro-Artemis demonstration might well develop into an anti-Semitic rampage, the more so because Paul himself was so evidently a Jew. A leading member of the Jewish community, Alexander by name, tried to gain the attention of the crowd and dissociate his community from Paul and the other missionaries; but the crowd, recognizing him to be a Jew, howled him down and for two hours kept up the cry, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”
At last the city secretary, thoroughly alarmed, secured something like silence and warned his fellow-Ephesians that the consequences of their riotous assembly might be very serious. The Roman administration of the province would not tolerate such behaviour, and might well deprive them of their civic privileges. The honour and renown of the great goddess were not at stake: the men with whom they were indignant had committed no sacrilege. If they had any charge to being against Paul or the others, let them make use of the law-courts. Matters of concern to the city should be dealt with at a regular meeting of the ekklēsia or civic assembly and not at an unruly gathering like this. (That the regular meetings of the assembly were held in the theatre is indicated by the inscription of A.D. 104 mentioned above, for it was during a meeting of the assembly that the silver image of Artemis and the other statues were to be set up there.)30 The secretary had good reason to be concerned: he was “perhaps the most influential individual in the city”,31 but for that very reason the Romans would hold him specially responsible for the citizens’ conduct.
3. Dangers at Ephesus
This could have been a dangerous situation for Paul, although the impression given by Luke is that, thanks to the city secretary’s forceful interposition, it passed off more quietly than might have been feared. Paul’s friends Gaius and Aristarchus appear to have taken little harm apart from a rough handling, unless those are right who see in Paul’s description of Aristarchus as his “fellow-prisoner” (Colossians 4:10) an allusion to a period of imprisonment experienced by Aristarchus (presumably in Paul’s company) about this time—an unnecessary supposition. But if Paul was not seriously endangered on this occasion, there were other occasions during these years which put him in peril of his life. When arguing with the Corinthian intelligentsia about the resurrection hope, for example, he asks: “What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus?” (1 Corinthians 15:32). The phrase “humanly speaking” is equivalent to “figuratively speaking” and shows that his fighting with beasts is not to be taken literally (although the author of the second-century Acts of Paul did take it literally and told an engaging tale of Paul’s encounter in the arena with a lion which he had previously befriended—and baptized!).32 But if the language is metaphorical, for what kind of experience would such a metaphor have been suitable? Then, at a later date, there is the reference in 2 Corinthians 1:8–10 to a mortal peril which he had recently endured in the province of Asia: death had seemed so imminent and certain that no escape appeared possible, so that when he did nevertheless escape, he greeted his deliverance as a miracle performed by “God who raises the dead”. It is possible that this peril was an illness which nearly proved fatal;33 but it is rather more probable that it was due to human hostility, and that certain circumstances made it advisable not to enter into unnecessary detail about it in writing.
In this connexion political events in the province may have some relevance. The proconsul of Asia at the time when Nero succeeded his stepfather Claudius in the principate (October 13, A.D. 54) was Marcus Junius Silanus, member of a distinguished Roman family allied by marriage to the imperial house. Silanus was the first casualty of the new principate: Nero’s mother Agrippina had him poisoned. This was done without Nero’s knowledge or approval; but Agrippina bore a grudge against Silanus’s family, and seized the earliest opportunity of getting him out of the way. Moreover he was, like Nero, a great great grandson of Augustus and there was some muttering to the effect that, since Nero was not a direct heir (Claudius’s own son Britannicus had a prior claim), the people would be better off with Silanus as emperor.34
Agrippina entrusted the work of getting rid of Silanus to two members of the imperial civil service in proconsular Asia—an official of equestrian rank named Publius Celer and a freedman named Helius, both of whom became increasingly influential in the following years.35 When the city secretary of Ephesus told the demonstrators in the theatre that the law-courts were available if they had any specific accusation to bring against Paul or his companions, he added, “and there are proconsuls” (Acts 19:38). The proconsul of Asia presided at the provincial assizes, but why should the secretary speak of “proconsuls” in the plural? One possibility is that the incident took place in the interval between the murder of Silanus and the arrival of his successor. The secretary would scarcely have referred to Celer and Helius as proconsuls, even if they did discharge some of the proconsul’s administrative duties in the interregnum; in the absence of one recognizable proconsul he may have used the generalizing plural: “there are such people as proconsuls” (NEB).
The theory has been propounded that Silanus had befriended Paul, possibly acquitting him when he was prosecuted at the assizes on a charge of temple-robbery, and that this fact worked to Paul’s detriment after the fall of Silanus. But why should Paul have been accused of temple-robbery? It has been suggested that his organizing of the Jerusalem relief fund may have been regarded by the leaders of the Jewish communities in Ephesus and other Asian cities as an encroachment on the collection of the annual temple-tax for the maintenance of the temple in Jerusalem.36 Roman law specifically authorized the collection of this tax and its conveyance to Judaea: indeed, in that very province of Asia, a little over a century before, the Roman governor Lucius Valerius Flaccus allegedly prevented the export of the tax to Judaea and had to stand trial in Rome in 59 B.C. on this and other charges of financial malpractice.37
But the temple-tax was collected from Jewish communities; Paul’s relief fund was launched for contributions from Gentile churches. Even so, it could have been argued that Paul’s Gentile converts were potential proselytes and hence potential contributors to the temple tax, so that, by detaching them from possible adherence to Judaism and encouraging them to contribute to the maintenance of the Jerusalem church, Paul was in effect robbing the Jerusalem temple. If this charge was included in the general accusation of temple violation pressed against Paul on his next visit to Jerusalem,38 and if it was likely to be raised at Rome when his case was referred to the emperor’s jurisdiction, Luke may have had a strong apologetic reason for making no explicit reference to the Jerusalem fund, despite the important part that it played in Paul’s strategy.39 (It has been pointed out that when the city secretary in Ephesus assured the crowd in the theatre that Paul and his friends had committed no sacrilege, the term he used had the literal sense of “temple-robbing”;40 but whatever the precise meaning of the word might be, on his lips it could refer only to the temple and cult of Artemis and so would be irrelevant to the present question.) If a charge of “temple-robbery” was preferred against Paul, it could well have been initiated by Ephesian Jews.
Paul indicates in the course of one of his letters to Corinth that alongside the wide-open opportunities for gospel witness at Ephesus there were “many adversaries” (1 Corinthians 16:9). There are hints here and there that some of these “adversaries” were persons of influence in the local Jewish community. When, a year or two after his departure from Ephesus, he had an opportunity of talking to the leaders of the Ephesian church during a break in his last voyage from the Aegean to Palestine, he reminded them of the trials which he had had to endure in their city “through the plots of the Jews” (Acts 20:19). Luke, to whom we are indebted for this information, was probably present at this meeting and heard what was said. It is Luke also who tells us that the hue and cry against Paul during his last visit to Jerusalem, which almost led to his being lynched on the spot, was raised by the “Jews from Asia” who were present for the feast of Pentecost (Acts 21:27 ff.). And Alexander the coppersmith who, according to 2 Timothy 4:14, did Paul “great harm”, may be identical with that Alexander who tried to dissociate the Jewish community of Ephesus from Paul in the minds of the assembled rioters in the theatre. It is not clear whether the “great harm” was done in Ephesus itself or elsewhere. (Was he, for example, a leader of those Asian Jews who stirred up such trouble for Paul in Jerusalem?)41
If—and the if must be emphasized—Paul was arraigned on this charge before Junius Silanus and was acquitted, his opponents may have judged that they had a better chance of success when Silanus was removed. If their second attempt procured a conviction, this could have led to “so deadly a peril” as Paul speaks of having undergone in Asia—a peril from which he did not think he could escape with his life. The invocation of his legal rights as a Roman citizen could have sealed his fate more certainly in this situation, if it became known at Rome that he had been protected by Silanus. But all this is a matter of hypothesis.
It was most probably in the period of the Ephesian ministry that Priscilla and Aquila “risked their necks” for Paul’s life, as he expresses it in Romans 16:4. His reference to this incident is (for us, whatever it may have been for the original readers) tantalizing in its brevity and vagueness; but it clearly points to an occasion when Paul himself was in mortal danger, and his two friends hazarded their own lives in an effort to help him. In the same context (Romans 16:7) he mentions Andronicus and Junias (or Junia if a woman is meant), notable members of the apostolic circle, whom he describes as his “fellow-prisoners”. When and where had they shared an imprisonment with Paul, if not at Ephesus?42
4. Ephesian imprisonment?
This opens the much-canvassed question whether Paul had to endure a term of imprisonment, or even more than one, during his Ephesian ministry. When in 2 Corinthians 11:23–27, written shortly after the end of his Ephesian ministry, Paul enumerates the hardships and hazards which he has experienced in the course of his apostolic service thus far, he includes among them “many imprisonments”. Like much else in this catalogue, the reference to these imprisonments brings home to us the immensity of the gaps in our knowledge of Paul’s career. The narrative of Acts mentions only one occasion before this period when Paul was imprisoned: that was when he and Silas were locked up overnight in the town jail at Philippi. We have no direct evidence that he was ever imprisoned at Ephesus, but the possibility cannot be excluded. The tower on a spur of Mount Coressus (Bülbüldaǧ) called St. Paul’s Prison has no acceptable claim to this designation, which nevertheless may reflect some tradition of his imprisonment in Ephesus; but we cannot be sure how old the tradition is. Such a tradition might be reflected also in the note at the end of the Marcionite prologue to the Epistle to the Colossians, stating that it was written by the apostle while in bonds at Ephesus, but this may be little more than a slip:43 the companion prologue to Philemon gives that epistle a Roman provenance, and Philemon and Colossians were certainly sent together from the same place at the same time.
The theory of one or more Ephesian imprisonments has been taken up within the past century by a number of scholars who have postulated such a setting for some of Paul’s “captivity epistles”:44 G. S. Duncan, for example, dated Philippians during a short imprisonment preceding Paul’s assumed acquittal by Silanus,45 and P. N. Harrison dated Philemon and Colossians (or at least what he took to be its authentic nucleus) “during a brief period of house arrest by friendly Asiarchs …, to keep Paul out of the reach of fanatical Jews, and avert a riot”.46 These datings, especially the latter, are doubtful.
Despite all these uncertainties arising from the scantiness of our information, we can say that the evangelization of proconsular Asia was one of the most fruitful phases of Paul’s missionary career and that his experiences during these years—especially, perhaps, the deadly peril towards the end, from which he was so unexpectedly delivered—had a profound effect on Paul’s inner life.