Theopedia

Paul's missionary journeys

Definition

Paul undertook three missionary journeys, recorded in Acts 13-21, traveling with companions including Barnabas, Silas, Timothy, and Luke from the church at Antioch in Syria across Cyprus, Asia Minor, Macedonia, and Achaia between roughly AD 48 and 57. Each journey planted or revisited churches in cities including Pisidian Antioch, Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, and Ephesus, several of which later received one of Paul’s own letters. Because Luke gives no absolute dates, the itinerary’s chronology rests on cross-referencing Acts and Paul’s letters against datable events in Roman provincial history.

Historical Development

The first journey (Acts 13:1-14:28)

At the direction of the Holy Spirit, the church at Antioch set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work, sending them off with John Mark as an assistant (Acts 13:1-5). Sailing first to Cyprus, Barnabas’s home province, they preached at Salamis and Paphos, where the proconsul Sergius Paullus believed after Paul struck the sorcerer Elymas blind (Acts 13:6-12). Sergius Paullus is independently attested on Cypriot inscriptions, though which of several men by that name held the proconsulship, and exactly when, cannot be fixed from the epigraphic evidence alone.1 From Cyprus the party sailed to Perga in Pamphylia, where John Mark turned back to Jerusalem, before Paul and Barnabas went on to Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe, preaching in the synagogues and provoking both conversions and expulsion by hostile Jews at each stop; at Lystra Paul was stoned and left for dead (Acts 13:13-14:20). J. Paul Tanner dates the whole outward and return journey, including a return trip through Lystra, Iconium, and Pisidian Antioch to appoint elders in each church, from April 48 to September 49.2

Back at Antioch, Paul and Barnabas reported “all that God had done with them” (Acts 14:27), but the peace was short-lived. Men from Judea began teaching that Gentile believers had to be circumcised to be saved (Acts 15:1), and Peter, visiting Antioch, withdrew from eating with Gentile believers under pressure from the same party, drawing Paul’s public rebuke (Galatians 2:11-14). The dispute sent Paul and Barnabas to Jerusalem, where the apostles and elders ruled that Gentiles were saved by grace and not obligated to the law of Moses, a decision recorded in Acts 15 and defended at length in Paul’s own letter to the Galatians.3 Preparing for a second journey, Paul and Barnabas then disagreed sharply over whether to bring John Mark again, and separated: Barnabas sailed for Cyprus with Mark, and Paul chose Silas (Acts 15:36-41).

The second journey (Acts 15:40-18:22)

Paul and Silas revisited the churches of Syria, Cilicia, Derbe, and Lystra, where Timothy joined them (Acts 16:1-5). Prevented by the Holy Spirit from preaching in the province of Asia and turned back from Bithynia, they passed through “the region of Phrygia and Galatia” (Acts 16:6-8) toward Troas, a route whose exact roads and provincial boundaries remain genuinely disputed among specialists; Glen Thompson and Mark Wilson’s 2016 study of the region’s road system quotes Luke Timothy Johnson’s judgment that “endless scholarly discussion has been devoted to determining the precise route Paul took… it is in fact unsolvable.”4 At Troas a vision of a Macedonian man calling “Come over… and help us” redirected the mission into Europe, and Luke joined the party there, marking the first of Acts’s “we” passages (Acts 16:9-10). Sailing by way of Samothrace to Neapolis, they reached Philippi, where Lydia and a jailer believed and Paul and Silas were imprisoned and then released as Roman citizens (Acts 16:11-40), then Thessalonica and Berea (Acts 17:1-15), then Athens, where Paul addressed the Areopagus (Acts 17:16-34).

At Corinth, Paul stayed eighteen months, meeting Aquila and Priscilla, recently expelled from Rome by Claudius, and was brought before the Roman proconsul Gallio, who dismissed the case against him (Acts 18:1-17). This is the one point in the whole itinerary fixed by evidence outside Acts: fragments of an inscribed rescript of Claudius to the people of Delphi, dated to the emperor’s twenty-sixth acclamation as imperator, place Gallio’s proconsulship of Achaia at about AD 51-52, and F. F. Bruce concluded from this that Paul’s Corinthian ministry ran “from the Fall of A.D. 50 to the Spring or early Summer of 52.”5 William Ramsay, working from the same inscription decades earlier, independently placed the Corinth stay from August 51 to February 53,6 and Tanner dates it March 51 to September 527; the year-or-so spread among these three reconstructions shows both how firmly the Gallio inscription anchors the sequence in the early 50s and how much latitude remains in fixing its exact months. From Corinth Paul sailed for Syria, stopping briefly at Ephesus, and returned to Antioch (Acts 18:18-22).

The third journey (Acts 18:23-21:16)

Paul again strengthened the churches of Galatia and Phrygia before settling at Ephesus for about three years, teaching daily in the hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:1-20:1).8 The ministry’s success provoked a riot among the city’s silversmiths, whose trade making shrines of Artemis was threatened by his preaching (Acts 19:23-41). From Ephesus Paul wrote 1 Corinthians; after departing for Macedonia, where he wrote 2 Corinthians, and Achaia, where a three-month stay at Corinth produced the letter to the Romans, he retraced his steps through Macedonia to Troas and sailed on toward Judea, deliberately bypassing Ephesus itself (Acts 20:1-16).9 At Miletus he summoned the Ephesian elders, warning them that “fierce wolves” would come in among them after his departure and that he himself expected imprisonment ahead (Acts 20:17-38). Sailing on by Tyre and Caesarea, where the prophet Agabus foretold his arrest, Paul reached Jerusalem for the last time and was seized in the temple (Acts 21:1-36), beginning the imprisonment that would eventually take Paul to Rome as a prisoner under guard (Acts 27-28).

Chronology

None of the dates above come from Luke directly; Acts marks time by festivals, weeks, and years of residence rather than by calendar dates. The one external anchor is the Gallio inscription discussed above, which fixes Paul’s time in Corinth to the early 50s. Working backward and forward from that anchor, and from the independently datable crucifixion of Christ in AD 33, Tanner places Paul’s conversion in AD 34/35 and the start of the first missionary journey in April 48.10 Bruce reaches a similar overall framework from the same Gallio evidence together with a separate line of argument about a famine under Claudius that Antioch’s church relieved before the first journey began (Acts 11:27-30), dated to the difficult years of AD 45-48.11 The resulting chronology commands wide agreement on the sequence of events and their placement in the late 40s and early 50s, even where individual scholars differ by a year or so on exact months.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. F. F. Bruce, “Chronological Questions in the Acts of the Apostles,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 68, no. 2 (1986): 279-80. ↩

  2. J. Paul Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 4th ed. (September 23, 2010), 4. ↩

  3. Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 4-5. ↩

  4. Luke Timothy Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992), 285, quoted in Glen L. Thompson and Mark Wilson, “The Route of Paul’s Second Journey in Asia Minor: In the Steps of Robert Jewett and Beyond,” Tyndale Bulletin 67, no. 2 (2016): 217-18. ↩

  5. Bruce, “Chronological Questions,” 282-83. ↩

  6. William M. Ramsay, “The Pauline Chronology,” in Pauline and Other Studies in Early Christian History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906), 361-62. ↩

  7. Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 7-8. ↩

  8. Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 9. ↩

  9. Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 11-12. ↩

  10. Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 1-2. ↩

  11. Bruce, “Chronological Questions,” 278-79. ↩