Every great story has a doorway verse, and for biblical Ephesus this is it. Sailing home from Corinth at the end of his second journey, Paul puts in at the harbor of Ephesus with his tentmaking partners Aquila and Priscilla. The visit is brief — a sabbath's reasoning in the synagogue — but the response startles him: they ask him to stay.
A seed, deliberately planted
Luke's wording repays attention. Paul "left them there" — Aquila and Priscilla stay behind in Ephesus, quite deliberately, as the advance party of the mission. When the Ephesians press Paul to remain, he declines with one of Scripture's great conditional promises: "I will return again unto you, if God will" (Acts 18:21). God willed: within a couple of years he was back for the longest stay of his life.
Standing in the verse
Paul's ship met the city at its harbor, and the walk from the quays into town crossed the quarter around the Commercial Agora — precisely where our tours enter the lower city. Somewhere within a few hundred meters of the theater stood the synagogue of this verse, still waiting for the archaeologist's trowel. The first steps of Christian Ephesus were literally steps, and you can walk their direction today.
Sources & further reading
- Acts 18:18–21 (KJV) — Bible Gateway — read the passage in context
- Britannica: Saint Paul the Apostle — the journeys in context