Axis Mundi: Macedonia and Achaia

"Peregrinatio Pauli" by Jodocus Hondius from a reprint
of "Hakluytus Posthumus" by Samuel Purchas, 1625

There were fewer Jewish communities in Macedonia and Achaia to facilitate the initial spread of the Gospel, and the apostles sometimes traveled long distances between cities in which they preached extensively. Paul, Silas and Timothy accompanied Luke to Philippi, the regional capital, where they remained for several days without encountering any fellow Jews on their first visit to Macedonia. They went outside the city gates on the Sabbath, expecting to find a gathering place along the river, but there they only encountered a woman from Thyatira (near Ephesus) who had come to believe in God and who now came to believe in Jesus. Her household became the nucleus of the first church in Macedonia, which provided material support for Paul until he became settled in Corinth.

From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days. On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was a woman from the city of Thyatira named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth. She was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us to her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us. (Ac. 16.12−15)

Moreover, as you Philippians know, in the early days of your acquaintance with the gospel, when I set out from Macedonia, not one church shared with me in the matter of giving and receiving, except you only; for even when I was in Thessalonica, you sent me aid more than once when I was in need. (Ph. 3.15−16)

The Gospel soon posed a threat to the established social and economic order in Philippi. Here local sentiment erupted in public denunciation of the apostles and their message following the healing of a demoniac slave girl whose owners had profited by her former condition. This resulted in the apostles being summarily flogged and thrown into prison without a trial. A positive consequence of these events was the conversion of their jailor and his household, which further established the church among the people of that region.

Once when we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a female slave who had a spirit by which she predicted the future. She earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and the rest of us, shouting, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who are telling you the way to be saved.” She kept this up for many days. Finally Paul became so annoyed that he turned around and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ I command you to come out of her!” At that moment the spirit left her. When her owners realized that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace to face the authorities. They brought them before the magistrates and said, “These men are Jews, and are throwing our city into an uproar by advocating customs unlawful for us Romans to accept or practice.” The crowd joined in the attack against Paul and Silas, and the magistrates ordered them to be stripped and beaten with rods. After they had been severely flogged, they were thrown into prison, and the jailer was commanded to guard them carefully. (Ac. 16.16−23)

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly there was such a violent earthquake that the foundations of the prison were shaken. At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone’s chains came loose. The jailer woke up, and when he saw the prison doors open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself because he thought the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted, “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!” The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved —you and your household.” Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household. (Ac. 16.25−34)

Thessalonica was the first city in Macedonia where Paul and his companions found a synagogue. There Paul reasoned with the Jews for three weeks with the result that some Jews and a larger number of Greeks (including a few prominent women converts) accepted the Gospel. This resulted in a bitter schism, which lead to a near riot provoked by jealous Jews who charged the Christians with sedition. After learning that the Gospel had received a more favorable reception in nearby Berea, these same Jews pursued Paul and his companions there. Paul subsequently decamped for Athens, where he awaited Timothy who meanwhile doubled back to Thessalonica to check on the believers there. Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians indicate that they endured considerable hardship.

When Paul and his companions had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a Jewish synagogue. As was his custom, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead. “This Jesus I am proclaiming to you is the Messiah,” he said. Some of the Jews were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a large number of God-fearing Greeks and quite a few prominent women. But other Jews were jealous; so they rounded up some bad characters from the marketplace, formed a mob and started a riot in the city. They rushed to Jason’s house in search of Paul and Silas in order to bring them out to the crowd. But when they did not find them, they dragged Jason and some other believers before the city officials, shouting: “These men who have caused trouble all over the world have now come here, and Jason has welcomed them into his house. They are all defying Caesar’s decrees, saying that there is another king, one called Jesus.” When they heard this, the crowd and the city officials were thrown into turmoil. (Ac. 17.1−8)

So when we could stand it no longer, we thought it best to be left by ourselves in Athens. We sent Timothy, who is our brother and co-worker in God’s service in spreading the gospel of Christ, to strengthen and encourage you in your faith, so that no one would be unsettled by these trials. For you know quite well that we are destined for them. In fact, when we were with you, we kept telling you that we would be persecuted. And it turned out that way, as you well know. For this reason, when I could stand it no longer, I sent to find out about your faith. I was afraid that in some way the tempter had tempted you and that our labors might have been in vain. But Timothy has just now come to us from you and has brought good news about your faith and love. He has told us that you always have pleasant memories of us and that you long to see us, just as we also long to see you. Therefore, brothers and sisters, in all our distress and persecution we were encouraged about you because of your faith. (1 Th. 3.1−7)

The Athens that Paul visited was a city living in the shadow of its glorious past, of which mostly only the architecture remained. Here Paul reasoned with somewhat indifferent Jews in the synagogue as well as with whomever he encountered in the marketplace, including some Epicurean (agnostic) and Stoic (pantheist) philosophers who took offense at Paul’s words and obliged him to explain himself before an assembly of the Areophagus. Here he delivered a universal history of religion which drew a divided response when he cited the resurrection of Jesus as the proof of his argument. Some sneered, though others expressed interest, and one member of the council, Dionysius, became a believer.

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said:

“People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship —and this is what I am going to proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring. Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” At that, Paul left the Council. Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others. (Ac. 17.16−34)

Paul did not linger in Athens, but travelled on to Corinth, the regional capital, where he preached for a year and a half, first in the synagogue and later in a household church of Jewish and Gentile believers.

After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them. Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks. When Silas and Timothy came from Macedonia, Paul devoted himself exclusively to preaching, testifying to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah. But when they opposed Paul and became abusive, he shook out his clothes in protest and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent of it. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.” Then Paul left the synagogue and went next door to the house of Titius Justus, a worshiper of God. Crispus, the synagogue leader, and his entire household believed in the Lord; and many of the Corinthians who heard Paul believed and were baptized. So Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God. (Ac. 18.1−8)

Corinth was a Roman colony founded partly as a face-saving gesture and partly for pragmatic reasons. Rome had destroyed the original Corinth in 146 BC for coordinating Greek resistance to Roman control over the Achaia, and the Greeks were fond of pointing to Corinth as an example of what Pax Romana truly meant. Julius Caesar chaffed at this negative publicity and determined to undermine it by resurrecting Corinth as a fabulously prosperous, and profoundly Roman city that showcased how Rome expected to remake Greek society.

The ancient temple to Aphrodite on the acropolis, famous for its multitude of prostitutes, was not rebuilt, and the new city was instead dedicated to Venus of Victory. This Venus was originally the Carthaginian goddess Astarte, goddess of Desire, whom the Romans and taken as their own but refashioned as their goddess of Victory following their utter destruction of Carthage. The symbolism of the substitution of this Venus of Roman Victory for the Aphrodite of Ancient Corinth was not lost on the Greeks.

The new Corinth was settled with Roman war veterans and minor nobles whose loyalty to Rome would serve as a beachhead in the region. The laws and customs were Roman, and the common language was Latin. There was a partial nod to Greek tradition in the form of a revival of the biannual Isthmian Games, second only to the Olympic Games in regional importance, though these were dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter, whose temple at Isthmia was the site of a sumptuous and prestigious banquet for the citizens of Corinth.

Given the nature and function of Roman Corinth, questions of status would have had implications entirely out of proportion to ordinary business in the city, and this is very likely what lies behind the eager admission to fellowship of an incestuous adulterer—presumably someone of very considerable status since incest was a capital crime under Roman Law, which hardly even the powerful dared flaunt. Meanwhile, maintaining good standing in the community was fraught with challenges for Roman citizens who became Christians because participation in civic and professional associations involved pagan sacrifice, feasting, and sometimes prostitution. Corinth was thus a strategic regional center where the local church struggled to maintain an identity rooted in Heaven.

Though Paul had mentored the Corinthian believers for a year and a half and named elders (probably former elders of the local synagogue) to carry on in his stead, the church was later roiled by the arrival of hardline Jewish believers from Jerusalem, the insidious influence of fashionable pagan beliefs like Neo-Platonism, and the ever present pull of worldly prestige and political connections. The church became riven with factions of every sort, with congregants settling some disputes in civil court rather than submit to the ruling of their Jewish elders, who in any case were sometimes deeply divided among themselves on moral and doctrinal issues.

Paul sternly reprimanded the congregation in Corinth after receiving disturbing reports while he was at Ephesus, and he expressed his intent to return to Corinth, but he later decided that the congregation might better heal without revisiting old wounds. Instead of visiting Corinth on his way to and from Macedonia, he instead passed through Macedonia on his way to and from Achaia, where he lingered for three months. During this time he wrote to the congregation in Corinth a second time, this time with words of great tenderness and consolation, and he expressed a renewed desire to visit them; however, it does not seem that Paul ever returned to Corinth.

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife. And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? […] I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people—not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people. (1 Co. 5.1−2, 9−11)

If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? Or do you not know that the Lord’s people will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, do you ask for a ruling from those whose way of life is scorned in the church? I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers! 1 Co. 6.1−6)