Following Paul in Turkey

For many years I have cherished the desire to follow “in the steps of St. Paul” (to quote the title of H. V. Morton’s justly famous book, first published in 1936), by visiting the Pauline sites of Greece and Turkey. At last I was able to do so in early April of this year, and was fortunate to have my friends Dick and Thea Van Halsema of the Reformed Bible College as companions and guides. In 1962 they drove their whole family through these parts (described in Thea’s delightful book Safari for Seven) and have since led several tour groups. Our most moving experience was to trace the Turkish part of the first missionary journey.

Perga in Pamphylia

Sailing from Cyprus Paul, Barnabas, and Mark landed at Perga, whose harbor in those days was located several miles up the Cestrus River, well protected from Cilician pirates. We wandered among the ruins of the city. Two rounded towers survive, which once framed the Victory Portal leading onto the twenty-one meters-wide main street. This consisted of two ways, separated by a central water channel and flanked by two rows of Ionic columns, each colonnade being paved with mosaic and lined with shops. But Paul did not linger there. Why not? And why did young John Mark desert?

We know that Paul was sick when he arrived on the Galatian plateau (Gal. 4:13, 14). I think William Ramsay was the first to suggest that he caught malaria in the low-lying swamps of Pamphylia and that his ‘thorn (or stake) in the flesh’ referred to the stabbing headaches that resulted. Certainly his eyesight was affected, or he would never have thanked the Galatians that, if they could have done so, they would have plucked out their eyes and given them to him (Gal. 4:15). It may be that his fever led him to seek the cool of the higher ground. I have sometimes imagined that Mark did not like the look of the nasty Pamphylian mosquitoes (I searched for some, but it was the wrong season), or perhaps he was scared of the bandits who were known to lurk in the Taurus mountains ahead of them. At all events, he went back to Jerusalem, and Paul regarded it as a serious defection.

Pisidian Antioch and Iconium

We do not know if Paul and Barnabas had to walk over the Taurus mountains, or whether a chariot or horses carried them at least part of the way. In either case they had about 150 miles to cover, and a steep climb through the pass. Yet the mission in Antioch was vigorous, and specially notable as the first occasion on which Paul deliberately “turned to the Gentiles.” A pair of Egyptian vultures circled over the nearby village of Yalvac as we drove through, an omen of the dereliction we were to see. For nothing is left of Pisidian Antioch except some arches of a noble first century B.C. Roman aqueduct, in a crevice of which a pair of Black Redstarts had built their nest.

Expelled by hostile Jews from Antioch, Paul and Barnabas journeyed southeast between the Sultan and Taurus ranges about 100 miles to Iconium (the modern Konya). I wondered if they had an eye for the beauties of plain, river, lake, and mountain that filled their horizons in every direction. I think so. For when later they reached Lystra, Paul preached about “the living God who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them” (Acts 14:15). In contrast to the disappearance of Pisidian Antioch, Konya is Turkey’s fourth largest town, with some 300,000 inhabitants. Called by William Ramsay “the Damascus of Asia Minor,” it is situated on the edge of a broad, well-watered plain, and is today a flourishing emporium for wheat and Turkish rugs.

Lystra and Derbe

According to Everett C. Blake and Anna G. Edmonds in Biblical Sites in Turkey (1977), there is still some residual uncertainty about which of two tumuli mounds covers the ruins of Lystra, and which of three or four the city of Derbe. For Lystra we visited a rather oblong mound a mile or more west of the village of Hatunsaray. A few lichen-covered stones and pieces of column littered its eastern slope, while its flat summit appeared to be occupied by moles, ground squirrels, and a fox whose heaps and holes betrayed their unseen presence. As I stood there, a pair of Hoopoes flew by down below, displaying in their undulating flight their striking plumage of black, white, and pink.

Paul was brutally stoned in Lystra, dragged out of the city, and left in the gutter for dead. The following day he left for Derbe. How could his bruised and battered body manage to travel those sixty or seventy miles? He could hardly have walked that distance, even with Barnabas’s help. Perhaps they went by horse or chariot. I think they will have been refreshed (as I was) by the sight of the snow-capped peaks of Pusala Dagi on their right and Karadag (“Black Mountain”) ahead of them, and by the pretty song of the Calandra Larks in the fields.

After driving through three villages of mud houses north of Karaman a brisk forty-minute walk brought us to Kerti Höyük, the most favored site for Derbe. It is another green tumulus and stands out in lovely relief against the brown earth of the ploughed fields around and the Black Mountain behind. Here Paul and Barnabas “preached the good news … and won a large number of disciples.” But there are no disciples there now, or indeed any human beings at all. Instead, as we approached the swamp that surrounds the base of the mound, twelve pairs of Ruddy Shelduck took to flight, honking in an amiable but melancholy fashion, their cinnamon bodies gleaming in the evening sunlight. Elegant Black-winged Stilts and other waders and duck had also found good feeding grounds in the Derbe marsh.

So of the four Galatian cities Paul and Barnabas evangelized, all of which were proud Greek or Roman colonies in their heyday, only one survives. The other three are deserted, unexcavated sites. Yet what humans have abandoned, birds have adopted as their home. In future I shall always associate Pisidian Antioch with Black Redstarts, Lystra with Hoopoes, and Derbe with Ruddy Shelduck, yes and the solitary pillar of Diana’s Temple in Ephesus with the white Storks that had built their nest on its capital.

Paul could well have continued his journey east and south through the Cilician Gates to his hometown of Tarsus. But if this was a temptation to him, he resisted it, for he retraced his steps to Lystra, Iconium, and Antioch in order to strengthen the disciples in the midst of their persecutions. We, however, did go on to Tarsus, a city of 115,000 people, all of whom are Moslems except for two Christian families. We visited the museum, but found no reference to Paul. Would the museum director accept an exhibition display of Paul if one were presented to him, we asked? He said he would. It would certainly seem appropriate in the birthplace of one of Tarsus’s most distinguished sons.

JOHN R. W. STOTT

John R. W. Stott is rector emeritus of All Souls Church, London, England.

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