their recent persecutions. The motive was twofold: first, to comfort and encourage the new churches in their tribulation, and then, more important, to supply them with the elements of a stable constitution. They appointed with prayer and fasting, and doubtless with laying on of hands, presbyters in every place.

The summary account of the next visit to these Gentile churches, in 50 A.D.,1 supplies us with few additional details: though there is a reference to the extraordinary progress made by the new faith.

Paul and Silas, fresh from the Council of Jerusalem, delivered on this occasion to each of the Galatian churches the decrees originally addressed to the communities of Antioch and Syria and Cilicia, but adapted, in principle, to all churches in which Gentiles were found. Further, to emphasise the " correctness" of his attitude, he circumcised Timothy, the son of a Gentile father, and not yet subjected to that rite. These things gave a handle to St. Paul's Judaizing opponents, who, as we see from the Epistle to the Galatians, represented him as no true Apostle, but an inferior minister and an emissary of the Twelve.

Nor do we learn anything fresh from the brief allusion to the third systematic visitation of the 'Phrygo-Galatic territory" in 53 A.D.3 Of the subsequent growth of Christianity in South Galatia during the first century, we have no direct knowledge. The earliest Galatian Christian known by name to us outside the New Testament is Hierax, who, at the trial of

1 Acts xvi. 1-5.

2 Acts xvi. 5.

3 Acts xviii. 23.

Justin Martyr in 163 A.D., proclaimed himself a native of Iconium and son of Christian parents.

Legend makes Sosipater, or Sopater of Beroea,1 a Macedonian kinsman (i.e. fellow-Jew) of St. Paul's, first bishop of Iconium, and names as his successor Tertius, the amanuensis of the Roman Epistle.

2

1 Rom. xvi. 21; Acts xx. 4.

2 Rom. xvi. 22.

THE

CHAPTER VIII

GENTILE CHRISTIANITY:

PROVINCE OF ASIA

HE province of Asia represented the kingdom of Attalus III, King of Pergamus, who, in 133 B.C., bequeathed his dominions to the Roman people. Comprising the entire western end of the peninsula of Asia Minor, it included Mysia, Lydia, History and Caria, and a large slice of Phrygia, with boundaries the flourishing Dorian, Aeolian, and Ionian of the province. colonies of the Aegean coast; the Troad, and the fringe of islands - Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Patmos, etc. The original capital had been Pergamus: but certainly later, and probably already in New Testament times, the Mysian city on the Caicus had begun to be supplanted by the greater and more thriving Ephesus. Besides being for some Importpurposes, at least, the political capital of ance of the province, and the place where, by regu- Ephesus. lation, Roman governors landed on assuming office, Ephesus was at this time the chief commercial centre. For a while Miletus, at the mouth of the Maeander Valley, by which the great eastern road passed, had rivalled Ephesus. But the journey from Ephesus was considerably shorter, and now for two or three centuries she had been supreme; and on her had converged the frequented roads from north, south, and east,

while coasting vessels from Corinth and Romewards. or from Antioch and the Levant made her a port of call.

1

To St. Paul, accustomed, if ever man was, to think imperially, Ephesus was a goal of longing only second to Rome. In this magnificent centre of life, of civilisation and culture, one of the three great cities of the East, the Apostle would have a door opened to him greater than any he had entered, since the mission work at Antioch on the Orontes had opened new vistas to the Church. In a sense, Ephesus was even more important than Antioch, being so much nearer to Rome.

It was probably towards Ephesus that the Apostles had intended to turn their steps in 47 A.D., when sickness upset their plans, and lost them the companionship of John Mark. It was certainly hither that his eyes were turned in 50 A.D., when on the very borders of the province he found himself "forbidden to preach the word in Asia."2 On his voyage back to Palestine, in the spring of 53 A.D., after founding the Church of Corinth, his pilgrim-ship calling at Ephesus, he availed himself of the opportunity to pay the city a brief preliminary visit. Here he did not outwear the welcome accorded to him by the inAquila and fluential Jewish colony. When they had heard him once in the synagogue, they

Prisca at
Ephesus.

desired him to stay. Anxious to reach Jerusalem for the Passover, he departed, promising to return "if the Lord will"; and left with them his friends Aquila and Prisca, who thus became the original founders and organisers of the Ephesian Church. A glimpse of their work is given us in the interval 1 With Antioch and Alexandria.

2 Acts xvi. 6, 7.

before St. Paul's next visit. In the summer of 53 A.D. there came to Ephesus a learned and eloquent rabbi from Alexandria, preaching with force and conviction in the synagogue an incomplete Christian doctrine, which needed to be supplemented by Aquila and Prisca. They gave Apollos himself fuller and more accurate instruction, and sent him to Corinth with commendatory letter to the Church. His converts were instructed further by the Apostle when he came, and received at his hands that Christian baptism of which Apollos had been ignorant (he had known only "the baptism of John "), and with it the gift of the Holy Ghost.1

St. Paul's

It was in the winter of 53 A.D. that St. Paul arrived in Ephesus, and with him a band of lieutenants, including Timothy, Erastus, Gaius, and Aristarchus. Anxious to reach his goal arrival. as soon as possible and to begin the evangelisation of the province from Ephesus itself as a centre, he avoided, it would seem, the great trade route by the Lycus Valley through Colossae and Laodicea, and took the higher mountain road-a shorter and pleasanter route for foot-passengers, descending at last by the valley of the Cayster.

In Ephesus he found a city where two elements were struggling for the mastery. He introduced a third which, after a long struggle, conquered them both. The two opposing forces in Ephesian history had been that of the Temple, representing an immemorial Asiatic cult,

1 Acts xviii. 24-xix. 7.

State of the city.

2 When he wrote Col. ii. 1 they "had not seen his face in the flesh," and he knew of them by hearsay (ibid., i. 4, 9).