Paul Carries the Gospel into Europe

about AD 49 to AD 52, estimated dateEstimated date

With Silas and Timothy, Paul crosses from Asia Minor to Macedonia and founds churches at Philippi, Thessalonica and Corinth. Acts brings him before the proconsul Gallio at Corinth, whose year of office an inscription at Delphi puts at about AD 51–52.

In Acts, after the meeting in Jerusalem Paul proposed to revisit the churches he and Barnabas had founded. They disagreed so sharply over taking John Mark that they parted. Barnabas sailed with Mark for Cyprus, and Paul took Silas through Syria and Cilicia (Acts 15:36–41). At Lystra he added Timothy, the son of a Jewish mother and a Greek father, and circumcised him (Acts 16:1–3). Acts says that the Spirit kept them from preaching in Asia and Bithynia, and that at Troas Paul saw in a vision a man of Macedonia asking for help. They sailed at once. Here the narrator of Acts first writes “we” (Acts 16:6–11).

At Philippi, a Roman colony, a dealer in purple cloth named Lydia was baptised with her household and took the travellers into her house (Acts 16:12–15). Acts says that Paul drove a spirit out of a slave girl who told fortunes and that her owners had him and Silas beaten with rods and jailed. It tells how an earthquake opened the prison at midnight, the jailer was baptised with his household, and the magistrates came to appease them on learning that the two were Roman citizens (Acts 16:16–40). Paul recalls being “shamefully treated” at Philippi (1 Thessalonians 2:2).

At Thessalonica Paul argued in the synagogue on three sabbaths that the Christ had to suffer and rise. Some Jews and many Greeks joined him, and a mob then accused the believers of proclaiming “another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:1–9). He was sent on to Beroea and from there to Athens (Acts 17:10–15). In Athens, Acts has him speak before the Areopagus. Starting from an altar inscribed “To an unknown god”, he proclaimed the God who made the world and will judge it through a man he raised from the dead. Some mocked, and a few believed (Acts 17:16–34).

At Corinth Paul lodged and worked with Aquila and Priscilla, was rejoined by Silas and Timothy, and when the synagogue turned against him moved to the house next door. Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed. Paul stayed eighteen months (Acts 18:1–11). Acts next tells how Jews of the city brought him before the proconsul Gallio, charging that he taught people to worship God contrary to the law. Gallio answered that he would not judge questions about “words and names and your own law”, and dismissed the case (Acts 18:12–17). Paul later sailed by way of Ephesus to Caesarea and returned to Antioch (Acts 18:18–22).

Paul’s letters confirm the outline: Philippi, then Thessalonica, then Athens, and preaching at Corinth with Silvanus and Timothy (1 Thessalonians 2:2) (1 Thessalonians 3:1) (2 Corinthians 1:19). They differ in a detail. Paul says that he sent Timothy back to Thessalonica from Athens, while in Acts Silas and Timothy stay in Beroea and rejoin him only at Corinth (1 Thessalonians 3:1–2) (Acts 17:14–15) (Acts 18:5). These are the first churches in Macedonia and Greece that Acts records. On the usual dating Paul wrote the first of his surviving letters during this journey; see the Letters of Paul.

How this is dated

Estimated date. A scholarly estimate from primary evidence, with a margin of years.

Acts gives intervals and one synchronism. Paul stayed at Corinth “a year and six months”, was brought before the tribunal “when Gallio was proconsul of Achaia”, and stayed “many more days” afterwards (Acts 18:11–12, 18).

The inscription from Delphi dates Gallio. It is a copy on stone of a letter of Claudius, and it survives in fragments. In lines 5–6 the stone has the end of a name, then “Gallio” and the words “my friend and proconsul”, of which some letters are restored. The editors complete the name as Junius; the verb that makes Gallio the source of a report to the emperor is also their restoration. In line 2 the numeral 26 survives. The editors restore before it the word imperator, so that it counts the emperor’s acclamations, and they restore his year of tribunician power, which is lost, as the twelfth (Gallio inscription (FD III 4, 286) lines 2 and 5–6). The twenty-seventh acclamation had followed by that twelfth year, which ran from 25 January 52 to 24 January 53 (CIL VI 1256), so the letter was written no later than that year. James H. Oliver, who re-edited the letter in Hesperia 40 (1971), pp. 239–240, heads the text “A.D. 52” and judges that Gallio was probably still proconsul when the emperor wrote.

Achaia had been governed since AD 44 by proconsuls chosen by lot (Cassius Dio, Roman History 60.24.1). Dio says that such governors held office for a year (Cassius Dio, Roman History 53.13.2), and Claudius required them to leave Rome by the middle of April (Cassius Dio, Roman History 60.17.3), so that a term began in the late spring or the summer. A proconsul in office in the first half of 52 would therefore have arrived in 51, and Gallio’s year is commonly put from the summer of 51 to the summer of 52, as in R. M. Gummere’s note on Seneca’s letter in the Loeb edition (1925). If the letter was written later in 52, a term of 52–53 is possible. Seneca says that Gallio took ship at once when he began to run a fever in Achaia (Seneca, Moral Letters 104.1), so he may not have served a full year; Tacitus calls Seneca his brother (Tacitus, Annals 15.73).

Acts does not say at what point in the eighteen months the hearing fell. Counting back from 51 or 52 puts Paul’s arrival at Corinth about AD 50, and the start of the journey, after the meeting in Jerusalem, about 49. Rainer Riesner, Paul’s Early Period: Chronology, Mission Strategy, Theology (1998), has Paul in Corinth in 50–51.