Paul_s 4 Missionary Journeys Explained in 1 HOUR)

The road from Jerusalem to Damascus runs about one hundred

forty miles north, climbing out of the Judean Hills, dropping

into the Great Syrian Plain, and ending at one of

the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth. Sometime around the

year thirty four of the Common Era, give or take

a year, a pharisee in his early thirties was riding

that road with a small armed escort. He carried letters

of authorization from the High Priest in Jerusalem, granting him

the legal right to enter the synagogues of Damascus, identify

any followers of the Way, and bring them back to

the Holy City in chains. He had already done this

in Jerusalem. It set them be judged. He intended to

do it everywhere the new sect of Galileans had spread.

His name was Saul, And at noon, with the sun

directly of the head, a light brighter than the sun

struck him to the ground. He heard your voice speak

his name twice. Acts Chapter nine, verses four and five

recalled what came next. He fell to the ground and

heard a voice say to him, Saul, Saul, why do

you persecute me? Who are you? Lord? Saul? Asked, I

am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. He replied three days later,

Saul of Tarsus would rise from blindness as Paul, though Apostle,

and the Roman world would never recover. To understand who

fell on that road, we have to go back about

thirty years in west across the Mediterranean to a city

called Tarsus. Tarsus sat at the southeastern edge of modern Turkey,

on the Sidnus River, behind a bay that had once

belonged to the Phoenicians and now belonged to Rome. The

geographer Strabo, writing in the late first century before Christ,

ranked Tarsus, along and Alexandria, grow as one or three

great university cities of the speaking East of just particularly

famous for the Stoic Philoso. Into this Greco Roman intellectual hub,

a Jewish boy was born somewhere around the year five

of the Common Era into the tribe of Benjamin. He

inherited two things from his father that would shape every

step of his life. The first was a strict Pharisaic

devotion to the Mosaic law. The second was Roman citizenship

by birth, a privilege so rare among first century Jews

of the Eastern provinces that it would later save his

life on a three separate occasions and eventually carry him

before Caesar himself. The boy was sent to Jerusalem for

advanced rabbinic training in the school of Gomaliel, grandson of

the great Hillel and the most respected teacher of Pharisaic

Judaism in his generation. The mission a tractate Sota remembers

Gamaliel as the man whose death meant that the glory

of the law ceased from that class from living emerged

a young Pharisee. We might fear that conviction and remarkable

rhetorical gifts. In Acts, Chapter twenty two, verse three, Paul

himself summarizes his early formation this way, I am a

Jew born in Tarsus of Cilicia, but brought up in

this city. I studied under Gamaliel and was thoroughly trained

in the law of our ancestors. Saul's first appearance in

the New Testament is not as a teacher or a preacher.

It is as a witness to a lynching. A Hellenistic

Jewish deacon name or the Word of the Lord had

been preaching a vision of the resurrected Messiah judgment side

there Josh Synagogust. He said he him, the found him

guilty of blass, great him aside the city to be stone.

The text in Acts Chapter seven words of the Lord

mentions Endures in harassing, a detail that will reverberate through

the rest of scripture. And dragged him out of the

city and began to stone him. Meanwhile, the witnesses laid

their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.

The word translated young man can stretch in age from

twenty to forty in Greek usage. He was old enough

to consent to the killing, and the next chapter tells

us he did. From that day forwardauses made will person

ever to crush the followers of Jesus before they spread further.

He hauled men and women out of their homes. He

authorized arrests, he approved executioners. And he was on his

way to do more of the same in Damascus when

the risen Christ confronted him on the road. What happened

in the three days that followed is one of the

most precisely documented spiritual events in ancient literature. Saul was

led blind into the city and lodged on the street

still called straight today in old Damascus, a Jewish believer

named Annanias for here is sent in a vision to

lay hands on him your light. The skins, as Luke

describes them, fell from his eyes. He was baptized, and then,

surprising every reader who expected him to march straight to Jerusalem,

Saul disappeared in Galatians chapter one, verses fifteen to seventeen,

writing twenty years later, to defend the divine origin of

his calling. Paul fills in the gap that acts leaves silent.

But when God, who set me apart from my mother's

womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to

reveal his son in me so that I might preaching

and few the gentiles, my immediate response was not to

consult any human being. I did not go up to

Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was.

But I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.

Three years in Arabia, probably the Nabataean kingdom east and

south of Damascus. Three years of silence, of relearning the

scriptures with new eyes, of preparing for what would become

a thirty year sprint across the Roman world. When he

finally returned into Damascus David and began preaching open knights

corrupt Jesus was the son of God resurrection. The vocal

synagog authorities decided that the safest cooks was to kill friends,

lowered him at night through an opening in the city

wall in a basket. He arrived in Jerusalem as a

marked man, whom the apostles still feared. Only Barnabas, a

levite from Cyprus, vouched for him publicly. Even then, Saul's

preaching provoked an assassination plot, and the brothers shipped him

quietly back to Tarsus, where he disappears from the narrative

for nearly a decade. He resurfaces in a city called

Antioch on the Orontestio was the third largest city of

the Roman Empires, after Rome and Alexandria, the cada of

the province of Syria, a steel a cosmopolitan height of

Greeks dune Syrians, where this day the Gospel was crossing

sister into Gentlem community. The Jerusalem Church sent Barnabas to investigate. Barnabas,

watching the work explode beyond his capacity to disciple alone,

traveled four hundred kilometers up to Tarsus found Saul and

brought him back. They taught together in Antioch for an

entire year, and the historian Luke notes a detail that

would change religious vocabulary forever. Acts Chapter eleven, verse twenty

six records the disciples were called Christians first at Antioch.

It was a Roman imperial label formed by adding the

Latin suffix aanus to the Greek title Christos, meaning partisans

of Christ. It was probably meant as mockery. It stuck,

and then sometime around the year forty six, in a

prayer meeting of teachers and prophets in that Antiochine church,

let the Holy Spirit gave the word that would launch

the first missionary journey. Acts Chapter thirteen, verse two. While

they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said,

set for me Barnabas and soul, and made the work

to which I have called them. They laid hands on

the two. Go in pe Church, send me the Lord.

Prit The man who had once ridden north toward Damascus

to Christians back to Jerusalem in Chains was about to

ride west towards the rest of the world with a

very different cargo. The harbor at Seleucia Pieria, sixteen miles

down the Orontes from Antioch, was the working port of

Roman Syria. From its stone keys, grain ships moved south

to Egypt and west to Italy, and pilgrims, traders and

now missions took ship for the Mediterranean. Lord favours our voyage.

Sometime in the spring of the year forty six, three

men walked the gangplank of a coasting vessel bound for Cyprus,

Barnabas the senior partner, saul Is protege, and a young

man named John Mark, Barnabas's cousin, brought along as a

junior assistant. The crushing was about one hundred and thirty

miles men. The destination was Salamis on the eastern coast,

the home synagogue community of Barnabas himself, who had been

born on the island. The Jewish synagogues of Salamis. It

is a difficult then traveled the entire length of the

island is with us roughly one hundred miles until they

reached Paphos on the western coast. Paphos was the seat

of the Roman Proconsul of Cyprus, and the proconsul that year.

People of Rome to ancient inspection plead in the woods

led in the stolen coast of Cyo. Command and the

later identified at Presidian Antioch, attest to a senatorial family

of Sergei Pauley with the states that extended deep into Asia.

Minor Sergius paulas Luke tells us, was intelligence who had

heard about this strange Jewish gospel. The merchant wanted to

know more stolen, but a sorcerer attached to his court,

a Jewish false prophet whose name in Aramaic was bar

Jesus and in Greek Elemus, tried to against the missionaries

this sorcery the encounter of bombages. In Confrontation Acts chapter thirteen,

the nine recalled the pivot where they are not my own.

Then Saul, but was also called Paul, filled with the

Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elemus and said, by the

one child of the Devil, I said right, magician in

Elemis went blind. The proconsul believed, and from that moment

on Luke stops calling the apostle Saul and starts calling

him Paul. The Hebrew name belonged to the Pharisee who

had chased Christians. The Roman name would belong to the

missionary who would chase the Gentiles from Paphos. The company

sailed north across the open Lata toward the southern coast

of age Mina and Gaia. Heferchi Mate du fiat Borschion

disembarked at Perega in Pamphylia. There abruptly and without an explanation,

John Mark left the team and returned to Jerusalem. The

text gives no reason. The fallout would not surface for years,

but it would eventually split Paul and Barnabas. The two

senior missionaries climbed inland alone, ascending the Roman via Sebaste,

through the Taurus Mountains and onto the high plateau of

central Anatonia. Their target was Pisidian Antioch, a Roman colonial

city established by Augustus, garrisoned with veterans, and now governed

under the very Sergei Pauli, whose estates the Proconsul on

Cyprus had inherited in the Pisidian Anti Synagogre. On a

sabbath made or preached to a complete missionary service recorded

in the New Testament, he retold the entire arc of

Israelite history from the patriarchs to David, then transitioned to

Jesus of Nazareth as the resurrected son of David dead

and raised the fulfillment of every prophetic line. Do not

let the noise the next worsap drown out. The city

gathered to hear him. The Jewish leadership, watching the synagogue

overflowed by gentile pagans hungry for the message, organized the

backlash the promises made to our Barnabas turn and quoted

Isaiah here the word of Chapter thirteen, verses forty six

and forty seven. We had to speak the word of

God to you first, since you rejected for good and

do not consider yourself worthy of yours. We now turn

to the gentiles, for this is what the Lord has

commanded us. I have made you a light for the gentiles,

that you may bring salvation to the ends of the earth.

They were thrown out of the city. They walked east

along the highway to Iconium modern Conya, the ancient capital

of Lacaonia. The same pattern repeated the synagogue the message

conversions of violent reaction. They escaped a plant stoning and

pushed forty miles south to Listra. Listra was a tiny

outpost compared to the cities. They had left the Roman colony,

in a region where great lords, the tane, and any

work was still stoken on the streets. Rise brother. There

Paul healed a man of credle timber hand. The crowd,

startled by the miracle, decided that the gods had visited

them in human form. The Roman poet o Veed in

his Metamorphosies, preserves a local legend that the Lyachaeonian region

had once entertained Zeus and Hermes, disguised as travelers who

had punished an inhospitable village and rewarded an old couple

named Boxes and Philammon. The Listrands, faced with two strangers,

heal and replaced the cabas my brother. His wisdom shall

guide you, because he was the speaker. The priest and

oxen and guards to sacrifice to them, and we are

only met to stop turn from these worthless Jewish opponents

from Antioch and Iconium arrived in Listra. They turned we

wanted to worship the demand into a mob that wanted

to stone them. Paul was dragged out of the city,

pummeled with rocks, and left for dead. The disciples gathered

around his body and He stood up and walked back

into the city. The next morning, he and Barnabas left

for Derbey, sixty miles further east, by preached and many disciples.

Then they made a decision that defines what kind of

mission Paul would run for the rest of his life.

Instead of returning to Antioch the short way by the

road back through the Solutioni gates, it turned around and

walked back through every single city He had just tried

to kill them the Pisidian Antioch, that you may strengthening

the new disciples and be strength, appointing the elders for

each church and instructing them on what was worthy of

rect from those visits with all stupid fourteen gentlemen. Verse

twenty two is one of the soberest sentences in the

New Testament. We must go through many hardships to enter

the Kingdom of God. They sailed back to Antioch from

Atalia and reported to the Sending Church everything God had done.

The first missionary journey had lasted roughly two years. It

had birthed at least churches in the Roman provinces of Pamphylia, Galicia,

and Pisidia, and it had set off the first major

theological crisis of the Christian movement. Some Jewish Christian teachers

from Judaea arrived in Antioch, insisting that the Gentile converts

were not properly saved unless there was circumcis. I cannot

and accepted the mostly full not man. Paul and Barnabas,

who had just finished preaching grace alone to dozens of

Gentile congregations, refused. The dispute could not be resolved locally,

so the church so that the Jewish us down to

Jerusalem to lay the case before the apostles and elders.

The meeting that follow recorded in the Masters chapter fifteen,

became ecumenical Council of the Christian Authority. Peter rose first

and reminded the gathering of his own experience with Cornelius.

Paul and Barnabas described what they had seen God among

the genters of the law James by the person and

the judgment head Jerusalem Church Gay held accountable, for which

the council framed and acts Chapter fifteen, verse twenty eight

with extraordinary care. It seemed good to the Holy Spirit

and to us not to burden you with anything beyond

the following requirements. The gentile churches were not under Mosaic law.

Salvation was by grace through faith in the crucified and

risen Christ full stop. The decision was sent in writing

to Antioch by the hand of two delegates, Judas bal

Sabas and Silas Paul. When he reflected on this council

later in Galatians Chapter two, Remus Josh Tribes, James, Peter,

and John had given Covenant Barbus the right hand of

fellowship agreement and confirmed the mission to this uncircumcised The

first journey was over. The theological battle for the Gentile

mission was for the moment one. The Antioch Church had

barely settled the dispute over gentile circumcision when Paul proposed

trip to revisit the churches he and Barnabas had founded

on the first journey. Barnabus agreed and wanted to bring

John Marc along again, using Paul the few young for this.

The young man who had abandoned the team at Perga

had not, in Paul's estimation, earned a second chance. The

disagreement was sharp enough to break the partnership that had

carried Christianity across the Eastern Mediterranean for the past several

years Barnabas took John Mark and sailed for Cyprus. Paul

chose a new partner, Silas, the same delicate Jerusalem had

sent with the Council letter, and headed overland through Syria

and Silitia, strengthening the churches as he went. Roughly decade later,

Paul would write affectionately about John Mark in his letters

to the colossums and to Timothy, suggesting the breach eventually healed,

but for now the two original missionaries were on different ships,

never to travel together again. Paul climbed back through the

Solition gates and into South Galatian, retracing the route of

the first journey in reverse. At Listra, he picked up

a third companion. Timothy was a young disciple, the son

of a Jewish believing mother named Eunice and a Greek

father we held spoken of by the brothers in Listra

and Icona. Yeither, Paul circumcised him before bringing him on

the road, not as a matter of salvation, the council

had just settled that, but as a matter of practical

access to the synagogues, where Paul still preached first in

every city. Then the team turned northwest toward unknown territory.

Twice the Holy Spirit closed doors. They tried to preach

in the Roman province of Asia and were forbidden. They

tried to enter Bithynia along the Black Sea and were

stopped again. They drifted northwest until they reached the coast

that Troas, the ancient city overlooking the Aegean, a few

miles from the ruins of Hermeric Troy. There in the night,

Paul had the vision recorded in Acts Chapter sixteen, verse nine,

during the night come over to Mathovision for man Macedonia,

standing and begging him come over to Macedonia and help us.

In the very next sentence, Luke's narrative shifts pronouns he

had been writing about they. He now writes about we.

The doctor from Antioch, the future author of the Gospel

that bears his name, had joined the team, almost certainly

had tro Us. The four of them booked passage across

the northern Aegean and landed at Neapolis, ten miles from

a Roman colonial city named Philippi. Philippi was no ordinary town.

Octavian had refounded it after the Battle of Philippi in

forty two BC, where he and marc Antony defeated Brutus

and Cassius. He settled veterans there and granted the city

the legal status of Ius Italico, the highest privilege of

provincial colony could hold, treating the city legally as if

its soil were Italian soil. Roman law applied. Roman magistrates

served the Via Ignatia, Rome's great military highway from Byzantium

to the Adriatic straight through. Philippi did not have a

synagogue large enough to register in the town, but it

had a place of prayer by the river outside the gate,

where a sabbath a small group of Jewish women gathered.

One of them was a businesswoman from Thiatera named Lydia,

a dealer in purple cloth. The die industry of Thiatera

is attested in three separate inscriptions of the period. The

lord opened her heart to Paul's message. She was baptized,

with her household and insistent dimisions to lodge into her

humble abode. The trouble in Philippi began with a slave

girl who had a spirit of divination and earned a

substantial income for her own favor telling fortunes. She followed

Paul through the streets, shouting that he and his companions

were servants of the Most High God. Paul, irritated, finally

turned and cast the spirit out. The owners, watching their

income evaporate, tragged Port and Silas before the Roman magistrates

and accused them of disturbing the peace in promoting non

row Us the decree of the Senate. The magistrates by

the authority, beaten with ron judge and thrown into the

inner cell of the city prison around midnight with their

feet locked in stocks and their backs roared from the beating.

Paul and Silas were singing hymns. The other prisoners were

An earthquake shook the foundations of the prison and opened

every door. The jailer, awakened to find the cells unlocked,

drew his sword to kill himself. Paul shouted across the

dark to stop, but you want, I will get. The

jailer fell at their feet and light. He must do

to be saved. Believe in the Lord gave the Christ

is recorded and will be set to sixteen US thirty one.

And your believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will

be saved. You and your household. The jailer washed their wounds.

They baptized him and his family before dawn. By morning,

the magistrates had realized they had publicly flogged uncondemned Roman citizens,

a serious crime under the lex Julia, we are prison,

and arrived at the prison personally to apologize. Years later,

writing from a Roman prison back to this very congregation,

Paul would describe the relationship in Philippians chapter one, verse

five as your partnership in the Gospel from the first

day until now, the church born from a riverside conversation,

a casting out, and an earthquake would never stop sending

him support from Philippi, the four missionaries traveled west on

the Via Ignatia, about one hundred miles to Thessalonica, the

capital of the Roman Province of Macedonia. In Thessalonica, these

preached three sabbobs in the synagogue, arguing from the scriptures

that the Messiah had to suffer and rise from the dead.

The increase of prominent women were persuaded we are the

unelieving in Jewish leadership, jealous of the response marketplace. You

open this door where the missionaries were magic to us

and dragged Jason before the city brought here. Luke uses

a striking technical word for those officials in Acts, chapter seventeen,

verse six Politics. The local magistrates of certain Macedonian cities.

Critics of Acts long claimed Luke had invented this term.

Then in the nineteenth century sixteen Macedonian inscriptions surfaced confirming

the title in exactly that period and place the same

lights preserve the accusation thrown the Christian justice. These men

who have caused trouble all over the world have now

come here. The brothers smuggled Paul and Silas out of

the city by night. They arrived at Berea, sixty miles southwest,

where the local Jewish community, well welcome brother with a

postulary arm, could not stop praising Please Acts Chapter seventeen,

verse eleven, Records predicts the earlier Now the Burian dukes

were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for

they received the message with great eagerness and examined the

scriptures every day to see if what Paul the council

said was true. Many believed, But when the agitators from

Thessalonica heard Paul was preaching in Berea, they came after

him there too. The brothers escorted him to the coast

and put him on a ship for Athens, asking Silas

and Timothy to remain behind and join him. Later, Paul

boarded alone for the city of Socrates and Plato. Athens

in the first century was no long with the political

capital it had been five hundred years earlier when Pericles

ran the Delian League from its acropolis. Rome had stripped

Athens of empire and rebuilt the city as a kind

of living museum and philosophical campus, where consequence of place

rolls in Aristotle, Epicurus, and looked never still operated and

understand that the Romans the son fled to absorber. We

must seek. The temples were everywhere. When Paul arrived alone,

having sent word ahead for Silas and Timothy to follow

as quickly as possible, he walked through that forest of

altars and was, as Luke says, with a memorable verb,

greatly distressed. Look to descript what he always did, he

went to the Synageust and the jew and of God,

fearing Greeks. Then he went to the agord, the form

of the marketplace at the foot of the acropolis, and reasoned,

with whoever was we must govern the soul among the

listeners who taught that virtue was the only good, and

that the universe was governed by rational divine fire and Epicureans,

who taught that the gods existed but did not interfere,

and that the goal of life was the pursuit of

tranquil pure cosmos. Order listened to Jesus found desurrection, and

they led him up the small rocky outcrop just below

the acropolis called the Areopagus. We cannot sit of the

city's religious court when new ideas were licensed or rejected.

The speech that followed in cross cultural apologetic As I passed,

Paul did not open with Moses and the prophets, as

he did in synagogues what he had observed walking the street,

but the city does not dwell. In seventeen, verse twenty

three records his words, 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. To

have an altar into anything you worship, what therefore your

worship is known, I am going to pretend to you.

From the inscription, he moved to the doctrine of creation,

the unity of the human race, the providence of God,

and finally, a quotation from the Cretan poet Epimenides preserved

in the same address Acts, chapter seventeen, verse twenty eight.

For in Him we live and move and have our being.

It was the only sermon in Act that begins on

pagan ground and never once cites the Hebrew scriptures by

chapter and verse the God who may reached the resurrection

from the dead, The audience laughed, come friends, nothing for

us to hear him again blind. A few league before,

a member of the Areopagus courts named Dionysius and a

woman named Damaris Temple left Athens, not crushed but recalibrating.

He traveled fifty miles west to Corinth, the wealthy commercial

hub at the narrow isthmus connecting central Greece to the Peloponnese.

Corinth controlled two ports, Lequium on the Adriatic side and

Sentry on the Aegean, and merchants paid handsomely to drag

their cargo across the four mile de Old Curson rather

than risk the long sea voyage around the Peloponnese. The

city had a reputation in the shipment to Corinthianize had

entered the Greek language as a verb meaning to live promiscuously. Paul,

by his own account in his later first letter to

this city, came in weakness and fear, and much trembling.

He took a job to a port himself. He met

a couple of his closest collaborators for the rest of

his ministry. Both Aquila and Priscilla Jewish tentmakers, recently expelled

from Rome. The expulsion is independently confirmed the Roman historians

were Tonius, writing seventy years later in his Life of

Almost that the Emperor Clunos slowly expelled the Jews from

Rome because they were continually causing disturbances of the instigation

of Crestus. Most scholars read Crestus as a garbled reference

to Christ and the disdaining the coming into Roman hynagogues.

The ancient chronographers date the expulsion to roughly the year

forty nine. Aquila and Priscilla had been swept up in it.

They opened their workshop and their home to poor the

Gospel which preached every so in the Corinthian Synagogue, arguing

that Jesus was the most high. When the synagogue leadership

turned on him next door, come inside. Literally, Journey went

to the House of God, fearing gentile named Titius Justice,

whose home shared a wall with the synagogue. The synagogue

ruler himself, Crispus, became to believe you with his type household,

and of the many Corinthians follow And then at a

moment when the opposition was building towards something dangerous, the

Lord appeared to Paul in a night vision Acts Chapter eighteen,

verses nine and ten. Preserve what he heard. Do not

be afraid, keep on speaking, do not be silent, for

I am with you, and no one is going to

attack and harm you, because I have many people in

this city Paul stayed. Was during these eighteen months in

Corinth that Silas and Timothy finally rejoined him, bringing news

from the churches in Macedonia. Timothy had visited Thessalonica troubly

and reported that the beliefs were standing firm, but were

anxious about Christians who had died before the return of Christ.

Would they miss the resurrection. Paul wrote a letter, the

earliest of his writings, that we still possess to answer

the question. First, Thessalonians composed in Corinth around the year

fifty or fifty one. A few months later, when a

forged letters circulating in Paul's name began telling the Thessalonians

that the day of the Lord had already come. He

wrote a second letter to correct the confusion. Say to Thessalonians,

the first two books of what we now call the

Pauline Corpus were written from a workshop in Corinth, addressed

to young church in Macedonia, a high missionary still working

with his half the gospel. The crisis in Corinth came,

as it always did, from the synagogue authorities. Do they

accuse he has transgressed the full law? Wrote to proconcert governed,

teaching people to push the contramode of the law. The

proconsul that year was a man named Lucius Junius Gallio Anianus,

brother of the philosopher Seneca. An inscription discovered at Delphi

in nineteen o five, a fragment of a letter from

the Emperor Claudius, fixes Gallio's term as proconsul of Aciah

precisely to AD fifty one and fifty two. That single

inscription is the most important external chronological anchor for the

entire life of Paul. From Gallio backward and forward. Every

other date in Paul's biography can be plotted with reasonable accuracy.

Gallio heard the accusation and refused to adjudicate me the

Jewish accuser that was ann water of Jewish religion. I

am finished Roman audience. I prove them from this judgments

being rendered, Remove the judgments, eat itself. The base has

been excavated in the ruins of old Corinth and is

still standing a stone platform on the south side of

the agora where Paul stood. Acquitted, Paul stayed a while longer,

then sailed for Ephesus with Aquila and Priscilla. Left them

there and continued on to Caesarrear and up to Jerusalem,

completing the second journey. By the time he returned to Antioch,

he had crossed two continents, founded churches in Macedonia and

a Caiah, written two letters that would become scripture, and

survived the legal scrutiny of a Roman proconsul. The next journey,

already on his mind, would carry him back to Ephesus

for the longest sustained mission of his life. Paul stayed

in Antioch for some time and then set out again,

traveling through the regions of Galatia and Phrygia, strengthening every

disciple in every village he had founded on the previous

two journeys. Then he descended from the Anatolian highlands toward

the Aegean coast and the city he had been forced

to bypass on the second journey. Ephesus was the third

largest city of the Roman Empire, after Rome and Alexandria,

the capital of the senatorial province of Asia, a port

and a crossroads city that controlled commerce between the Aegean

and the trade routes leading inland through Phrygia and Galicia,

It was also the religious capital of the Greek world.

The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, four times the size

of the Pathanon, with one hundred and twenty seven marble

columns over fifty feet high, was one of the seven

Wonders of the ancient world. The poet Antipater of Sidon,

who compiled the original list of the wonders, so when

he saw it that the Olympian gods themselves must have

lost their splendor by comparison. While Paul was still on

the road, a Jewish scholar from Alexandria named Apollos had

arrived in Ephesus, But I was eloquent did reverse him.

The burning with zeal from what he had received Jesus.

But what he had received was incomplete. He knew only

the baptism of John the Baptist, Priscilla and a Creed

the cut. Paul had left in the city on the

previous with Ostinagogue, and he kindly took him into their

home and explained the way of God more accurately. Apollos

went on to Akyah with letters of recommendation and became

one of the most effective teachers in the in the

Corinthian Church. When Paul finally arrived in Ephesus encountered the

same be transformed about a new cycles who had been

baptized into guides baptism but had never even heard of

the Holy Spirit. Acts Chapter nineteen, verse two recalls the

question Paul opened with, did you receive the Holy Spirit

when you believed? May your fate laid hands on them,

baptized them, name Jesus, and the Spirit came on them

with prophetic and tongue speaking signs. We are here to

proclaim to preach in the Ephesian Synagogue that his pasts.

When the predictable Roses knows that he rented a public

lecture hall belonged to a teacher named Tyranus and taught

their daily The Western text of Acts adds the vivid

detail that he taught from the fifth hour to the

t and Schue Siu and cho from about eleven in

the morning to four in the afternoon, the hottest part

of the day, when the Mediterranean world rested and the

hall would have been free. He kept that schedule for

two years. Acts Chapter nineteen, verse ten summarizes the result.

This went on for two years, so that all the

Jews and Greeks who lived in the province of Asia

heard the word of the Lord. It was during this

Ephesian period that the seven churches addressed in Revelation two

and three Smyrna, Pergamum, Thaterra, Sardis, Philadelphia, Laodicea, and Ephesus

itself were almost certainly planted by Paul's co workers fanning

out from his Ephesian base. God did extraordinary miracles through him.

Sweat cloths and work aprons that had touched Paul's bond

were carried to the sick and the demonized, and the

diseases lifted. The contrast between what was happening in Paul's classroom.

How long as being attempted in the streets of pagan

Ephesus eventually produced one of the strangest scenes in Acts.

A Jewish chief priest named Skiva had seven sons who

worked as itinerant exorcists. Watching Paul's success with the formula

the Name of Jesus, they decided to add it to

their own incantations. They tried it on a violent demon

possessed man, invoking Jesus who po creatures, But who As

Chapter nineteen, verse fifteen preserves the demon's reply one of

the most terrifying lines in the New Testament, Jesus, I

know an age, I know about are, but who are you?

The man leapt on them and gave the seven sons

such a beating that they fled the house naked Aroma,

dis watch us closely tonight. The story spread through Ephasis,

and a peculiar fear fell on the city. Many who

had practiced sorcery, the so called Efisia Gramata, the Ephesian

magical letters and incantations, referenced by Plutarch and other ancient

authors as among the most apprized in the Greco Roman world,

and stukaon Ton brought their books and burned them publicly. Luke,

with the eye of a financial historian, gives the receipt

and acts Chapter nineteen, verse nineteen. The value of the

destroyed manuscripts came to fifty thousand drachmas, the equivalent of

fifty thousand days of labour for the average worker. A

small library went up in smoke, and the gospel grew

mightily and prevailed. Toward the end of Paul's stay, the

silversmiths of Ephesus realized they had a problem. The cult

of Artemis kept the local economy afloat. Pilgrims poured into

the city year round for the Artemission festival, and one

of the staple souvenirs was a small silver shrine model

of the goddess in her temple. As Paul's gospel pulled

customers away, the demand for the shrines fell. A silversmith

named Demetrius gathered by trade guild. We shall frame the

issue in the Religiousters triggered they have blaspemed the god.

Crowd sees two weeks traveling companions Gaeus and Aristarchus, and

rushed them into the Great Theatre of Ephesus, the same

theatre that still stands today.

Carved into the slope of Mount Peon with twenty five

thousand seats. Two hours, the entire city stood in that

stone bowl, enchanted. As Acts, Chapter nineteen, verse twenty eight records,

the greatest atomist of the Ephesians, Paul wanted to address

the crowd, the discounner, and even some of the isiacs,

that we must go. Provincial magistrates refused to let him enter.

The crisis was finally diffused by the city clerk appointed official,

who pointed a temple of the missionaries built by the

hands of the tempt but inspired by that the Goddess,

and that the pro consul could be summoned by the

High anyone had a legitimate quelling. He dismissed the assembly.

The riot ended sometime during this period, probably in the spring.

Before the riot, Paul had written a letter back to

corinth in response to troubling reports about divisions and immorality

in the church. There. He gave his planned route in

First Corinthians, Chapter sixteen, Verses eight and nine. But I

will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost, because a great

door for effective work has opened to me and opposed

you must leave now both halves of that sentence had

now come true. We will The door had opened wider

than anywhere else he had been. The opposition had filled

a twenty five thousand seat theater. It was time to leave.

When the riot Nepus had finally subsided, Paul gathered the

disciples farewell, said his goodbyes, and traveled north into Macedonia.

The route was the Vera Ignatia in reverse, through the

same cities he had founded on the second journey, Philippi, Thessalonica,

and Berea. Along the way, he wrote a second letter

to the Corinthian Church, his most personal letter, defending his

apostleship against rival teachers who had infiltrated the Corinthian congregation

while he was in Ephesus and had been undermining his credibility.

He poured into that letter to the catalog of his sufferings, beatings, shipwrecks,

days adrift, hunger, sleeplessness, not to boast, but to expose

how shallow his rival's credentials were by comparison. He pushed

south into Greece and spent three months in Corinth itself,

lodging probably with Gias the Corinthian be with whom he

names as his host in the letter. He wrote next

the wealthy city gave him the resources to compose the

most theologically dense treatise of his career, The Letter to

the Romans. Romans was not addressed to a church Paul

had planted. He had never been to Rome. The letter

was a missionary funding document, a formal introduction laying out

the Gospel as Paul understood it, in the hope that

the Roman believers would help send him on to Spain.

He named his current preoccupation in Romans, Chapter fifteen, Verses

twenty five and twenty six. Now, however, I am on

my way to Jerusalem in the service of the Lord's

people there. For Macedonia and Achiah were pleased to make

a contribution for the poor among the Lord's people in Jerusalem.

That contribution of financial gift, collected over years from Gentile

churches across two continents to relieve the impoverished believers in Judea,

was Paul's most ambitious project after the Gentile mission itself.

The historian F. F. Bruce called it a sociological experiment

in Christian unity, designed to bind together the two halves

of the church that the Council of Jerusalem had only

theoretically reconciled must strikes a change. Instead of sailing directly

across the Aegean, he doubled back through Macedonia, and a

delegation of seven men, the representatives of the contributing churches

carrying the collection the gods, gathered to escort him. They

sailed from Philippi. After passover, crossed to Troas, and waited

there a week. On the last night, in the upper

room of a three story house, the latch burning and

the air thick, and darkness not proached until midnight, a

young man named Uticus, sitting in an open window face

and dropped three stories to the contract below. The disciples

ran down and found him dead. Paul descended after them,

threw himself on the body, embraced it here, and stood up,

announcing that the boy was alive. To us. They went

back upstairs. Paul broke bread ate and kept talking until daybreak.

When the morning sun came up, he walked to the harbor.

The coasted along the western sh south and at Melitas,

thirty miles down from Ephesus, Paul sent for the elders

of the Ephesian Church. He had decided not to enter

Ephesus itself, the city he had spent three years building,

because he was racing to reach Jerusalem by Pentecost and

could not afford the time the visit would consume. The

elders walked the thirty miles the speech he delivered to

them on the beach of Melitas, that is the only

sustained address in cases to a Christian audience, and recorded

it in detail. He reviewed his three years money, comforted

his tears, his integrity and not coveting silver or gold

or anyone's clothing, his refusal to draw a salary. He

warned them that wolves would arise from within the eldership

itself to devour the flock, and he framed his own

life with a sentence that has anchored Christian missionaries for

two thousand years. Acts, Chapter twenty, verse twenty four. However,

I consider my life worth nothing to me. My only

aim is to finish the race and complete the task.

The Lord Jesus has given me the task of testifying

to the good news of God's grace. He closed by

quoting a saying of Jesus that the Gospels do not preserve,

recorded only here in Acts chapter twenty, verse thirty five, Oh,

it is more blessed to give, prim to receive. Let

your presence descend them. He knelt down on the beach

and prayed with her. They wear me loudly, embraced him,

kissed him, and grieved most over his prediction that they

would never see his face again. They walked him to

the ship. The voyage south traced the eastern Mediterranean coastline

costs Rose Patar, where they transferred to a larger ship

bound for Phoenicia, then Cyprus on the horizon, then Tire

and sign upon the local decided his glory shall fill

The spirit was speaking through prophets for the kingdom Polt City.

The disciples failed not to settos at Caesarea Maritima, Herod

the Great's engineering marvel of a port with its artificial

harbor of underwater concrete blocks that Roman engineers had pioneered. There,

they came to stayed in the home of the Engels, Travels,

one of the original seven deacons of the Host. Chapter six,

a prophet named Agabus, whom Luke had introduced earlier in

the narrative, came down from Judea, tied his own hands

and feet with it, and announced that the Holy Spirit

had revealed exactly this fate awaiting Paul in Jerusalem, the

disciples and falls traveling companions, getting him not to go.

I must follow the Pool's reply in Acts, chapter twenty one,

verse thirteen. We must sound like a man who had

crossed an inner threshold with us and could not turn darkness.

Why are you weeping and breaking? My Lord is our strength,

and I am ready not only to be wipe away

every but also to die in Jerusalem for the name

of the Lord Jesus. Luke records that they fell silent.

The verse that follows in chapter twenty one, verse fourteen

captures the resolution of an entire community to a calling.

None of them could deflect. When he would not be dissuaded,

we gave up and said the Lord's will be done.

They arrived in Jerusalem the next week and presented the

collection to James and the elders of the Jerusalem. To

Paul the meeting, You're glad you have come. The crisis

began the day after us, when Jewish pilgrims from the

province of Asian recognized and the temple courts and accivaged

him of bringing a gentile companion past the court of

the gentiles into the inner courts. An inscription warning gentiles

on pain of death against entering the inner sanctuary has

been recovered, dating to exactly his sacred place. The accusation

was false, a blasphem riot it ignited was real. Cohort

station in the Antonio Fortress, Gloria Rome had to send

a tribune and soldiers running down the steps pointing him

before the mob beat him to death. The third missionary

journey ended in chains. The Roman commander pulling Paul out

of the temple courtyard that day was a tribune named

Claudius Lysias, in command of the cohort garrisoned in the

Antonia Fortress. The Antonio was Herod's Stone fortress, named for

marc Antony, built into the northwest corner of the Temple

mount with stairs leading directly down into the outer courts,

so that troops could descend at the first sign of

trouble during festivals. Lysius assumed Paul was an Egyptian who

had recently led a band of assassins into the desert.

Paul Mesphthras, asking commission to address the crimson. We are

able to proclaim to you the spoken Aramaic the mob

fell sigh, my brethren, he told win his life store

upon us Tartars, the old Mighty. The Damascus row forward

the call to the Gentiles, that the word gentiles. The

mob exploded again. Lycius hauled Paul into the fortress, ordered

him flocked for interrogation, and only I am a Roman

learned that the bow demand them by rights a Roman citizen.

The next afternoons arranged a here lived before to find

day being childish him. The hearing evolved into a brill

between Pharacees and Saducees over the resurrection. That night, Paul

received another of the strategic visions that had punctuated his

life since Damascus Acts. Chapter twenty three, Verse eleven records

what the Lord told him, standing beside him in the cell.

Take courage, As you have testified about me in Jerusalem,

so you must also testify in Rome. It was a

promise that would carry him through the next four years.

The next morning Puts the only family member to appeared

on the entire New Testament narrative to the immediately a plot.

Forty men had bound themselves under oath, neither to eat

nor to drink until they had twilled poor Oath acted

immediately by the gods that night with an escort of

two hundred infantry, seventy cavalry and two hundred spearmen, nearly

half the available cohort. Paul was hustled out the gates

and rushed seventy miles north to Caesarea, beyond the reach

of Jerusalem's mob and Sanhedrin alike. For the next two

years he sat in custody at Caesarea under the procurator

Antonius Felix. Tacitus in his History's book five, called Felix

a man who wielded the power of a king with

the temperament of a slave. So Tonius added that he

had married very que princess. He had taken.

Drusilla people and the youngest daughter of herod Agrippath, the

first husband.

Not as a criminal, Paul Pritters shared to Felix and Drusille,

promised by gorighteous self control overcoming judgment, and Felix procurate

text says, was afraid take him away and sent Paul

back to his cell. He kept Paul there for two years,

hoping for a bribe that never came. When Felix was

finally recalled to Rome, to face accusations of misgovernment. His successor,

Cortius Festus, inherited the case file. Festus, eager to start

his term on good terms with Jerusalem, asked whether Paul

would consent to be tried to seize deead waited on

that road exercised the right that had been kept in

reserve since the day he was beaten with rods in

Philippi records, the former US legal phrase that ended the

preceding I planned to testify before gode kemferred with his counsel,

answered to Caesar, he would go before the ship. Say

the local king, Herod agripp Of, the second great grandson

of Herod the Great, arrived in caesar Rear on a

state visit with his commister. Beneath this festas silence open

the king's expertise on Jewish religious questions. Might this draft

to coherent charge Saul, that you relieve her into one

of the most polished defeminies of the Christian God. The

God should because of the resurrecd testimony trial be Festus

interrupted him to call him incredible, that Paul, that he

was fortunate to be able to make my defense. Then

your manage a gripper and I admit the king and

believe that the Hebrew the promise made by God Chapter

twenty six, verse twenty eight preserves a Gripper's reply, do

you think that in such a short time you can

persuade me to be a Christian? Agrippa later told Festus

that the allegians have not released, had not appealed to

throne exist the appeal was now binding. Paul was going

to Rome. In late September of probably the year fifty nine. Paul, Luke,

and Astalgus were handed over to a Roman centurion who

the August and cohort named Julius. They sailed up the

Phoenician coast to Sidon, then north pasted Cyprus to Myra

in Lysia, where Julius transferred his prisoners to a grain

freighter from Alexandria loaded bound for Italy. Roman shipping operated

under a custom called mayor Klausen Closed Sea that suspended

all Mediterranean voyages between mid November and early March because

of the storm season. The Alexandrian freighter was already late.

They beat their way west against contrbary winds and finally

took shelter at a small bay on the southern coast

of crete called fair Havens. Paul warned the centurion and

the captain that the season was finished. The centurion deferred

to the God, or you will have They tried to

push another forty miles west to a better protected harbor

named Phoenix, a wind out of the northeast called by

the sailors the Jurycleiden fell on the ship from the

mountains of Crete and drove them helpless into the open Mediterranean.

For fourteen days, they ran before the storm under bare poles,

jettisoning the card over the side, finally away the ship's tackle,

with no sun or stars visible to navigate by. On

the night before they ran aground, with the crew about

to abandon ship, and the time of tribulation hand and

gave him the promise. What had he repeated to Iron

two hundred till seventy six souls on under board, as

Chapter twenty seven, verses twenty four record his works. Last night,

an angel of the Gods, to whom I belong and

whom I serve, stood beside me and said, do not

be afraid, Paul. You must stand trial before Caesar, and

God has gurgeously given you the lives of all who

sail with you. At dawn they sighted unfamiliar land, ran

the ship aground on a sand, and the servant drove

the stern apart. Every dissenter reached the beach alife. They

had landed on Malta. The most careful modern reconstruction of

the voyage by the Scottish nautical scholar James Smith, in

his eighteen forty eight study The Voyage and Shipwreck of

Saint Paul, examined every wind direction, every distance, and every

nautical term Luke used and concluded that the narrative is

the precise lock of an ancient voyage written by an

eye witness. They wintered three months on Malta. Paul was

bitten by a viper while gathering firewood, and shook it

off without effect. He healed the father of the chief

magistrate of the I healed you a man, Luke calls

Publius of recurring fever and dysentery. When the Mayor Clausum

opened in February, an Alexandrian ship that had wintered there

carried them on through Syracuse, Regium and Puteoli, where the

Roman believers had heard he was coming, and met him

forty miles down the Appian Way at the Forum of

a Grace of the Lauretaus Christ. Paul wept when he

saw them. In Rome, he was placed under what Roman

law called custodia militaris micinchith military custody, chained at the

wrist to a rotating praetorian guard, but allowed to live

in his own rented quarters and receive visitors freely. He

stayed two years that way. The Book of Acts ends

without describing the trial, on a sentence that Luke seems

to have chosen as the emotional summary of three decades

of mission Acts Chapter twenty eight, Verses thirty and thirty one.

For two whole years, Paul stayed there in his own

rented principalities and welcomed all who came to see. He proclaimed,

the kingdom got ashamed of the God's taught because it

is the Jesus Christ bring salvation to everyone's bulliess and

without hindrance. During those two years chained to the imperial bodyguard,

he wrote four letters whose theology has carried the Church

for two thousand years. Ephegians on the Cosmic Christ, Colossians

on the Supremacy of Christ over all, rival philosophies, Philammon

on the Gospel, reconciliation of a runaway slave, and Philippians

on Joy in chains of the Praetorians cycling through his apartment,

he wrote in Philippians, Chapter one, verse thirteen. As a result,

it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and

to everyone else, that I am in chains for Christ.

The man whose appeal had carried him to the heart

of the Empire, was even chained to its soldiers, evangelizing

the body of Menemster Caesar and the Book of Acts

six two eighty, with pawn for still under house arrest,

still preaching, still writing, Luke does not tell us how

the story finished. He had two volumes, his Gospel and Acts,

and he closed at the moment that completed the geographic argument.

He had set out to make Jerusalem to Rome, the Gospel,

reaching the capital of the Empire. What happened next is

a question with three independent answers, all pointing in the

same direction. The first is the silence of Acts itself.

Luke devoted entire chapters to Paul's trials before Felix, Festus

and a gripper. If Paul had been executed, at the

end of the two year house arrest. Luke would almost

certainly have said so. The fact that he did not

the word closes with Howell still preaching freely, is itself

an indirect testimony that the trial before Caesar resulted in acquittal.

Roman law required prosecutors to appear within a fixed period

to press their case. If Paul's accusers from Jerusalem had

not made the long voyage to Rome to argue the charge,

the charge would have lapsed and the prisoner would have

been released by default. The second answer is the geography

of the pastoral epistles. The three letters Paul wrote to

Timothy and Titus contain travel notes that fit nowhere in

any of the journeys recorded in Acts. In Titus, chapter one,

verse five, Paul tells his colleague, the reason they left

you in treat on equivocurse that you might put in

a call was remember finished and in every town as

I directed you, Acts records no missionary stay on crete.

Paul mentions in One Timothy that he had traveled into

Macedonia after leaving Timothy in Ephesus, and he tells Timothy

in tewod Timothy that he had recently been Introhas and Miletus,

and intended to winter in Nicopolis on the Adriatic coast.

Of none of those itineries fit the Actus timeline. They

make sense only if Paul was released from Rome around

sixty two sixty three, traveled east through the Aegean for

several years, and was eventually re arrested. The third answer

is the testimony of the early Church itself of Rome,

writing to the Corinthian Church around the year ninety five,

only thirty years after Paul's death, and from the very

city where Paul had been killed, described Paul in his

First Letter, Chapter five, as having reached the limits of

the West before his martyrdom to a Roman audience in

the late first century, the limits of the west meant Spain.

Paul had announced his intention to evangelize Spain in the

Letter to the Romans years earlier, naming the journey as

the next horizon after Renhipio. The Moratorian Fragments Calok, the

oldest surviving canonical list, written around the year one undred seventy,

repeats the same memory Paul had set off from Rome

to Spain. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing his ecclesiastical history in

the early fourth century summarized the consensus of the earlier

sources in Book two, Chapter twenty two. Paul had been

released after a first defense in Rome, had resumed his

missionary travels, and was rearrested only later in a different

political climate. That different political climate had a name. On

the night of July eighteenth and the year sixty four,

fire broke out in the wooden shops along the southeastern

slope of the Circus Maximus and burned for nine long days.

When the smoke cleared, ten of Rome's fourteen districts had

been reduced to ash. The Emperor Nero was rumored, fairly

or unfairly, to have arranged the fire to clear ground

for his planned Pallace complex. To deflect the rumors, he

needed a scapegoat the Roman historian Tacitus, writing in his

annal's book fifteen to the three four records what happened

to move at dawn? Nero blamed the Christians sect already detested,

for what Tacitus calls their hatred of the human race,

and ordered them rounded up. They were sewn into animal

skins and torn apart by dogs, nailed to crosses, or

coated with pitch and litterus torches in Nero's gardens. The

Tacitus passage is the earliest non Christian Roman reference to christ.

Tacitus mentions in Passing that the founder of the sect, Christus,

had been executed by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.

Sometime in the years that followed the fire, almost certainly

between sixty five and sixty seven, Paul was arrested again.

The conditions of his second imprisonment are reflected in Secwo Timothy.

He was no longer in his own rented house. He

was in a cold, dark cell, almost certainly the lower

chamber of the Mammotin prison at the foot of the

capitol line hill, where state criminals awaiting execution were held.

His friends had scattered. He asked Timothy to bring him

a cloak he had left introas parchment scrolls he needed

for study, and Mark, the same young man whose desertion

in Pamphylia had broken his partnership with Barnabas decades earlier.

These the reconciliation was complete, Luke Paul wrote in two

Timothy Chapter four vers. Only Luke is with me. Get

Mark and bring him with you, because he is helpful

to me in my ministry. Earlier, in the same letter,

he had told Timothy why he was writing in such

urgency two Timothy, Chapter four, verses six to eight. For

I am already being poured out like a drink offering,

and the time for my departure is near. I have

fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I've

kept the faith in store for me, the crown of righteousness,

which the Lord, the Righteous Judge, will award to me

on that day, and not only to me, but also

to all who have longed for his appearing. It was

his last letter. The execution probably took place in sixty

seven on the Ostian Way, the Roman road running south

from Rome to the harbor at Ostia. As a Roman citizen,

Paul was spared crucifixion and beheaded by sword instead. The

site of his execution, marked from the earliest Christian centuries,

is now called trey Fontaine three fountains for the legend

that Paul's head bounced three times after the cut, and

a spring rose at each spot. The legend can be

put aside, the location cannot. The body was buried two

miles back along the Ostian Way at a cemetery owned

by a Christian woman named Lucina. Constantine blent the first

basilica over the tomb in the early fourth century. Theodosius

the Great in landsto now the current Basilica of Saint

Paul outside the walls covers the site to this day.

In two thousand nine, after a six year project authorized

by Pope Benedict the sixteenth, a.

Se sarcophagus directed beneath the high water never opened in

modern times.

This changes. Everything was probed with a fiber optic camera

and a small core sample of bone fragments was removed

for carbon fourteen dating. The result, announced publicly in June

of that year, was definitive. The bones dated to the

first or second century. They had been buried at the site.

Christian tradition had associated with Paul since before Constantine. The

Vatican stopped short of formally declaring the bones to be Paul's,

but the dating was consistent with everything the Church had

remembered for nineteen centuries. The man who had ridden north

toward Damascus to drag Christians back to Jerusalem had finished

his life beheaded outside the walls of Rome in the

persecution of an emperor whose own death by suicide would

come less than a year later. Nero's empire fell, Paul's

letters did not. Thirteen of them, composed in workshops, in

dictation chambers, on shipboard, and in prison cells from Antioch

to Rome, became scritcher. They make up roughly a quarter

of the New Testament. They have shaped the doctrine of

the Church for two thousand years. On grace, on faith,

on the death and resurrection of Christ, on the unity

of jew and Gentile, on marriage and ministry, on ring

and joy. Paul summarized his own self assessment in One Timothy,

chapter one, verse fifteen. Here is a trustworthy saying that

deserves full acceptance. The worthy of mice came into the

rotation to save sinny acceptable in yours whom I am

the worst my rock, And if the worst could be

remade into the apostle who carried the Gospel to the

limits of the West, no one is beyond the reach

of the same grace. That is the claim Paul lived

and the claim he died defending the road that began

with a flash of light at noon outside Damascus ended

at sunrise on the Ostian Way. The journey it's set

in motion has not ended yet