Via Wikipedia.
By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
NOV. 3, 2023 | A surprised interest from a recent trip to Greece got me to realize how vast and difficult the travels must have been as the Apostle Paul moved around in the years after the death of Christ. He was the first Christian evangelist, as he spread the gospel of the church in those rugged days as no person has spread it since.
Even today, if you had only the convenience of an automobile, you would put on many hard miles to go as far and as wide as this traveler did. While it would be exhausting now with modern powered vehicles, figure how difficult it must have been to travel by foot, or maybe by horse or camel or sail-powered ship, in those days.
The best reference I found to Paul’s travels was in a link on the internet. It goes into great detail to tell of those historic travels. If you want to see that information, click here.
All this interest in Paul began while on an air flight from Istanbul to Athens. I saw on the screen Thessalonica, where Paul wrote about, 200 miles northwest of Athens, and Corinth, about 60 miles southeast of Athens. (Later on the trip, when on a ship’s cruise to the Dalmatian Coast, we would narrowly steer through the Corinth Canal, cut in limestone, saving the ship something like 430 miles around Peloponnesia to get from Athens to the Aegean Sea. I was out on the foredeck to see this phenomenal passage.)
The airline map hooked me. Always a curious student of geography, wanting to know what geographic features are around me anywhere I go, I immediately knew that I would have to find more details to understand the travels of Paul so many centuries ago.
That night in Athens I learned from my laptop and internet maps the location of many places in the Bible. Phillipi, I found, was near Thessalonica in what is Macedonia. And Ephesus was a town in western Turkey, as is Colossae. And of course, Paul would eventually sail to Rome, where he was imprisoned, but continued to write to the Christian communities.
Just think of the hardships Paul encountered on these many journeys. And you wonder how this travel was paid for, and why he decided to go to the many places that he visited.
Of course, these questions of mine have ticked the minds of many scholars over the ages, and much has been written. And yes, much of Paul’s writing is in dispute.
Wikipedia tells me that Paul is certain to have written the letters of the New Testament’s Romans, Galatians, Corinthians, First Thessalonians, Philemon and Philippians. But many scholars have in dispute his epistles to Second Thessalonians, Colossians, Ephesians, both Timothys, and Titus. The letter to First Timothy is thought to be the last epistle he wrote before his death.
Scholars say that though some letters are attributed to Paul, the style of the letters are different from his other works, and therefore questionable. They primarily do not have his common themes, and reflect a church hierarchy that is more organized and defined than the church in Paul’s time.
You can appreciate Paul’s journeys more now that you understand the geography of that area in that era. And to think he never had the convenience of a Waffle House!
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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