“The City of Ephesus” by Sandra Glahn

Today, the city of Ephesus may be mostly ruins investigated by archaeologists and tourists. But at one time, it was the chief city of what we call Asia Minor. Rome made it the capital of the province of Asia, and it was an important center of religious worship of the goddess Diana or Artemis.  

Ephesus was also a significant setting for the Apostle Paul’s missionary journeys. In the Book of Acts, it’s known for a riot caused by silversmiths angered by Paul’s healing of a possessed slave girl, for Paul’s letter to the church there, and his farewell discussion with the Ephesian elders, the one in which he warned about the wolves devouring the lambs. Timothy ministered there.

 

Dr. Sandra Glahn, who’s written more than 20 books and aims to make research accessible, has written The City of Ephesus: A Short History, a concise, well-written account of the story of Ephesus, focusing on the period from 100 B.C. to 100 A.D. 

 

Glahn details the importance of the temple of Artemis. The goddess was believed to protect the city, women in childbirth, and even a protector of wealth, serving as something like a depository. People came, she writes, from Europe, Asia, and Egypt to pay homage. When Paul cast the demon from the slave girl, it didn’t take much for the girl’s owner, resenting the loss of income, to transfer his anxiety to the silversmiths who profited from the Artemis cult.

 

She details the social, political, and religious contexts for the city during the 200 years between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. And then she briefly describes what happened to Ephesus after the time of Paul. 

Sandra Glahn

 

Glahn has published a number of Bible studies on the books of Jonah, Ruth, Judges, Esther, Song of Solomon, Malachi, Luke, Ephesians, Colossians, and Philippians; the letters to the seven churches in Revelation and the Sermon on the Mount; several books on women’s issues; and even novels. She had a column on Substack and her own blog. Her podcast on Youtube is called The Chick Report with Dr. Sandra Glahn. She also conducts student tours or workshops in Italy, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Calvin College’s Festival of Faith and Writing.

 

The City of Ephesus isn’t an exhaustive study of the city and the times in which it flourished. But succeeds, and succeeds well, in its aim to provide a detailed overview. 

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Murders for June – Jeremy Black at The Critic Magazine.

 

Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House: A Redemptive, Modern Novel – Daniel Sundahl at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The 120^th Anniversary of Vauxhall Bridge – A London Inheritance.

 

The Stamp Act and the American Revolution – Kyler Burd at Journal of the American Revolution.

Douglas Boin’s “Coming Out Christian in the Roman World”

My masters program at Washington University in St. Louis involved a series of seminars that focused heavily in the history and religion areas. Two courses, “Athens and Jerusalem” and “History of the Early Church,” shared a number of themes and readings. And one of those themes had to do with persecution of the early Christians in the Roman Empire during the period from Nero (circa 64 A.D.) to Constantine and the legalization of Christianity in 312 A.D.

The persecutions tended to be local or regional, and they tended to be sporadic. They were certainly not ongoing and empire-wide, with a few exceptions, notably toward the end of the period, when the Emperor Diocletian did authorize a persecution across the breadth of the empire (his wife and daughter, as it turns out, were Christians). But most of the persecutions were local or, at most, regional. (I can recall doing a research paper on the persecution in 177 A.D. at Lugdunum, what is now Lyon in France.)

As Douglas Boin notes in Coming Out Christian in the Roman World: How the Followers of Jesus Made a Place in Caesar’s Empire, Christianity didn’t just “emerge” legally with the Emperor Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 A.D. Nor was Christianity the cause of the empire’s fall, as Edward Gibbon (and others) argued. The story is more complex,

and Boin takes a painstaking view of rather disparate events and people from all over the Roman world to help explain what happened.

An assistant professor of Ancient and Late Antique Mediterranean History at Saint Louis University, Boin received a B.A. in Classics from Georgetown University and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin. He’s does extensive archaeological research at Ostia, once the seaport for the city of Rome.

He relies upon the writings of the early church fathers Tertullian, Cyprian, Ignatius of Antioch, among many others; original Latin / Roman sources, including like Tacitus, Trajan, and Cicero; and Jewish sources like 2 Maccabees and Philo of Alexandria. He ranges the empire, from Ostia and Rome to Alexandria and what is now Iraq.

Douglas Boin

And he goes beyond the period of Constantine and Christianity’s legalization, coming to the question of how Christianity, once an illegal and unpatriotic “cult,” managed to outlaw traditional Roman and other religions within a century of its own legalization (Ambrose of Milan, a figure connected to St. Augustine, plays a significant role in influencing imperial policy).

Coming Out Christian is an academic work but written in an accessible, sometimes almost entertaining style. And because it’s an academic work, and not a theological one, Boin does not accept traditionally ascribed authorship of a number of parts of the New Testament.

But even from my own evangelical perspective, I find it a valuable book, not the least reason being how contemporary scholarship is employed to understand ancient questions and events.

Photograph by Enzo Abramo via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

“A Week in the Life of Corinth”

It’s an unusual idea for a Christian academic book – use the form of the novella to tell a story. That’s what Ben Witherington, American New Testament Scholar at Asbury Theological Seminary, did with A Week in the Life of Cornith. He wrote a novella, and made life in Corinth at the time of St. Paul come alive.

Corinth is one of the “cities of St. Paul,” and one where the apostle lived for an extended period. In Witherington’s story, St. Paul is a character, but not the major character. That title belongs to Nicanor, a freedman, who is establishing his various business activities, making alliances, developing contacts and networks. He’s a former tutor in the family of Erastos, a wealthy landowner who has come to follow the new religion called Christianity. (Erastus – with a u – and Nicanor are two names belonging to two of the original seven deacons appointed by the early church in Jerusalem; they served with the more well known Stephen.)

Wrapped all around the story are sidebars about aspects of life in Corinth and the Roman Empire. They include factual information of gladiators and gladiatorial schools, slavery, Corinth’s destruction and rebirth as a Roman colony, Paul’s physical appearance, how patronage functioned in Roman society, the role of money and bartering, the education of children, the Roman baths, food establishments, and many other subjects. Also included are photographs, city maps and diagrams of Roman homes, villas and other structures.

All of this factual information supplements how Witherington integrates historical understanding into a fictional narrative. And it works, and works well.

While not the main character, St. Paul is a character, living with a couple from Rome (the Prisca or Priscilla and Aquila of the Bible) and working as a tentmaker to support himself. He is facing a trial before the proconsul Gallio (a real person and a brother of Seneca the Younger, the Roman philosopher and statesman). And he will also play a critical role in the lives of both Erastos and Nicanor.

What A Week in the Life of Corinth does is to make Roman history and early Christian history approachable and understandable. It also gives history the sense of immediacy, that the reader is right there with the characters, both fictional and real, whether it’s the smell of the streets in the Corinth slums or the gluttony of a rich men’s banquet.

It’s life as St. Paul and the early Christians experienced it.