We're On a Mission From God

The story of Paul’s first missionary journey is presented in Acts 13 and 14. Some scholars question its historicity since Paul’s Letter to the Galatians seems to rule it out. Others point to a verse (2 Tim 3:11) that references sufferings Paul endured “in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra” and those are three towns on the itinerary of the first missionary journey. It is widely held that 2 Timothy is not an authentic Pauline letter, but it may be an independent witness to the Lukan source that underlies Acts 13-14.

The mission begins in Syria when the Holy Spirit spoke to the five “prophets and teachers” leading the Antiochene church and Barnabas and Saul were commissioned to go forth and proclaim the word (13:1-3). The other three men are otherwise unknown, but the mention that Manaen was brought up with Herod Antipas indicates that Christianity was not just a religion of the lower classes.

Conflict in Cyprus

The first stop is Cyprus, Barnabas’ homeland (13:4-12). From Antioch, it was a day’s walk to the port city of Seleucia where they were able to take a cargo ship – no passenger ships in the 1st century CE – to Salamis on the eastern shore of Cyprus. They walked the length of the island, proclaiming the word in the synagogues as they went, eventually arriving on the western shore at the capital of Paphos (100 miles from Salamis).

In Paphos the apostles encountered a Jewish magician named Bar-Jesus who was in service to the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus. Saul (who, Luke finally tells us, was also known as Paul) admonished Bar-Jesus. As a result, the magician became blind and the proconsul became a believer. The whole story is reminiscent of the conflict between Peter and Simon Magus in 8:5-25.

There are a couple more items of interest in this passage. First, Sergius Paulus was the proconsul of Cyprus between 46-48 CE, so that gives us a rough idea of when the first missionary journey could have taken place. Second, from this point on Luke will refer to Saul as Paul. Unlike Simon who was given the name Peter (Aramaic Kephas, meaning “rock”) by Jesus, the names “Saul” and “Paul” were given to him at birth. “Saul” would have been his Hebrew name and “Paul” his Roman name. (John Mark would be another example of a double name.) It makes sense that Paul would go by his Roman name in his interactions with the Gentile world.

Inciting a Crowd

With the Cyprus part of their mission concluded, Paul and his companions began the next leg (13:13-52). They sailed to Perga on the southern shore of Asia Minor where John Mark left them to return to Jerusalem. Barnabas and Paul continued on the dangerous 100-mile overland route to the mountainous region where Pisidian Antioch lay. It was called “Pisidian” because it was close to the border of the district of Pisidia (and to distinguish it from a dozen other cities named Antioch).

According to Acts, Paul gave a lengthy speech in the synagogue and won over a following, but that success aroused jealousy in the local Jewish population who eventually had the apostles expelled from the district. They shook the dust of the town off their feet in protest, just as Jesus instructed the disciples (cf. Lk 9:5; 10:11), and moved on to Iconium where the sequence of success and rejection repeated itself (14:1-7).

After fleeing Iconium under threat of stoning, Barnabas and Paul travelled 25 miles to the Roman town of Lystra (14:8-20). It was the first town they visited that did not already have an established Jewish community so they preached in the agora (the public open space). Paul saw a man there who was lame from birth and healed him. The Gentile crowd reacted by calling the apostles Zeus and Hermes and wanted to offer sacrifices to them. (Luke explains that Paul was called Hermes because he did most of the speaking, Hermes being the messenger of the gods.)

Barnabas and Paul tried without success to dissuade the crowd from treating them as deities when Jews from Pisidian Antioch and Iconium arrived and turned the crowd against the apostles. Paul was stoned and left for dead outside the town, but his disciples formed a circle around him and Paul recovered. The next day the apostles left for Derbe but Acts reports nothing of the visit there.

“The priest of Zeus…brought oxen and garlands to the gates; he and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice.” Paul and Barnabas in Lystra (1678) by Johann Heiss

Everybody Must Get Stoned

The entire Lystra episode bears tell-tale signs of Luke’s reworking. Paul’s healing of the crippled man is a parallel to an earlier healing story involving Peter (3:1-10), but in his letters Paul never refers to having performed healings. Jews stalking the apostles from town to town in order to turn the local pagan populace against them stretches credulity. The Jewish antagonism is part of the Lukan program to show that hostile rejection of the Christian message on the part of the Jewish population forced the apostles to turn to the Gentiles.

That said, in 2 Cor 11:24-25 Paul speaks of his sufferings as am apostle: five floggings (Jewish punishment), three beatings with rods (Roman punishment), one stoning. Stoning usually ended in death, but I wonder if the reference to Paul’s disciples forming a circle around him may have been an intervention to stop a stoning in progress.

[Side note: The RSV (1952) translates 2 Cor 11:25a, “Three times I have been beaten with rods; once I was stoned.” In the NRSV (1989) this verse was translated, “Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning.” In the 37 years between these two translations, the term “stoned” developed a different connotation in the US English vocabulary and the NRSV translators didn’t want readers thinking Paul got high on anything other than the Holy Spirit.]

Acts 14:21-28 reports that Barnabas and Paul retraced their steps before sailing back to Syrian Antioch. It would have been shorter and quicker to continue along the road towards Tarsus from which they could then book passage home to Antioch. Does it make sense to return to cities that had rejected and almost killed one of them? The route of the return journey suggests that Luke exaggerated the rejection and downplayed the successes. After all, even in Lystra where Paul was stoned he had won over disciples who formed a protective circle around him.

Paul’s first missionary journey was the shortest of the three in terms of distance travelled. Scholars estimate that he and Barnabas were away for two years. The actual travel time by ship and foot was about two months; most of the time was spent in residence in the cities on their itinerary.

Clouds on the Horizon

When the apostles gave an account of the outcome of their mission to the Antiochene church, they said God “had opened a door of faith for the Gentiles.” Gentiles were a tremendous opportunity for the new faith, but also posed a problem. It was one thing to win over Gentile God-fearers, but quite another to convert pagan Gentiles to Christianity. What about dietary laws and the rest of the Mosaic law? Do the new Gentile converts also need to be circumcised like all Jews? Those were the questions that pre-occupied the minds of the leaders in Jerusalem. The future of the Christian faith would depend on the decisions they were about to make.