Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 76:1 (NA 2025)
Article: By Land Or By Sea: Paul’s Preferred Mode Of Travel In The Acts Of The Apostles
Author: Steve Reece

TynBull 76:1 (2025) p. 95

By Land Or By Sea: Paul’s Preferred Mode Of Travel In The Acts Of The Apostles

Steve Reece

Professor Emeritus of Classics
St Olaf College
[email protected]

Abstract

By my calculations, the apostle Paul travelled over 12,000 kilometres by land and over 8,000 kilometres by sea just on the journeys that he made in the latter half of his life that happen to be recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. The modern reader cannot help but be astonished by these long distances. But what would have astonished an ancient Greek or Roman reader was not the sum total of the distances of Paul’s journeys but rather the ratio of land to sea travel. Most ancients who lived, like Paul, along the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, ‘like frogs around a pond’ as Plato quips (Phaed. 109b), preferred to take the much easier, faster, and more efficient routes by sea, and the ratio of their land to sea travel would have been the reverse of Paul’s. Paul is depicted in the Acts of the Apostles as someone who shunned sea travel whenever possible and preferred to travel by foot rather than by ship in almost every instance in which this option was open to him.

1. Introduction

Ancient travellers throughout the Mediterranean world had an ambivalent attitude toward the sea. On the one hand, the sea provided an avenue for swift travel and efficient commerce throughout the Mediterranean: ships conveyed essential foods and commodities, desirable imports, and vital communications, and they offered a quick and generally safe return home for travellers abroad. In his famous ‘Ode to Man’ (Ant. 334–375), the fifth-century BCE tragedian Sophocles celebrates among the many wondrous inventions of humankind the ability to forge a path through the sea. The fourth-century BCE historian Xenophon touchingly narrates the story of 10,000 Greek mercenaries, landlocked for months as they marched through vast swathes of Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, and Armenia, being overwhelmed with joy upon finally catching a glimpse of the sea. They immediately raised the cry θάλαττα, θάλαττα (‘the

TynBull 76:1 (2025) p. 96

sea, the sea’) at the prospect of a return to their homeland that even the far-off Euxine sea offered (Anab. 4.7.19–27). The first-century CE novelist Chariton tells the story of the young bride Callirhoe, taken by pirates from her home in Syracuse in Sicily to Miletus in Ionia. There, she takes some consolation in living by the sea, where she can see the harbours of Miletus, separated by a mere ship’s voyage from Syracuse (Chaer. 4.7.8), but when she is later taken far inland to Persia, she loses all hope and laments ‘I, an islander, have been brought ...