The Church of Ephesus

Acts names no founder, only a couple and a preacher who were in the city before Paul settled there. On his first, short visit Paul left Priscilla and Aquila behind⁸. While he was away, Apollos, a Jew from Alexandria, taught in Ephesus and was taken aside by the same pair for further instruction, so the community was older than Paul’s long stay². When Paul came back he spent three months in the synagogue and two years teaching in the hall of Tyrannus⁹.

Later generations filled in the line of leaders. Eusebius records the tradition that Timothy was the first bishop of Ephesus, and 1 Timothy portrays Paul asking him to stay there⁵. The church’s link with John also rests on tradition rather than scripture: the New Testament is silent on where John lived and died, and the earliest writers to place him at Ephesus are Irenaeus and Polycrates, bishop of the city, towards the end of the 2nd century¹⁰.

The letter praises the Ephesian church before it warns it. It commends the church’s toil and endurance, its testing and rejection of false apostles, and its hatred of the practices of the Nicolaitans⁴. Then comes the charge, which the King James Version renders “thou hast left thy first love”. Unless the church repents, its lampstand will be removed from its place⁴.

Ephesus heads the list of seven: Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea¹.

Three sides of first-century Ephesus help in reading the letter: its goddess, its emperors and its harbour.

Artemis. The city’s pride was its goddess. In Acts the town clerk quiets the rioters by reminding them that Ephesus guards the temple of Artemis and her sky-fallen image¹¹. The Temple of Artemis was also a bank: Dio Chrysostom says it held large sums deposited by Ephesians, foreigners, cities and kings¹². The craftsmen who rioted against Paul made their living from miniature silver shrines of the goddess, and it was their trade they feared for¹³.

The emperors. In 29 BC Octavian allowed the Romans of Asia to set up a sanctuary of Dea Roma and the deified Julius Caesar at Ephesus¹⁴. In AD 89/90 the Temple of the Sebastoi was dedicated, making Ephesus neokoros, official temple warden of the imperial cult, for the first time¹⁵. After Domitian’s memory was condemned, the cult was redirected to the Flavian family as a whole¹⁶. The title then multiplied: “twice neokoros” under Hadrian, “thrice” from AD 211, and briefly “four times” under Elagabalus, a record in the Roman East¹⁷.

Trade and government. Strabo, writing under Augustus or Tiberius, calls Ephesus the largest trading centre of Asia this side of the Taurus mountains¹⁸. It was the seat of the Roman governor of Asia, though whether it was formally the capital is debated¹⁹. The customs law for the province, revised in AD 62 under Nero, survives in an Ephesian inscription²⁰. Keeping ships moving took constant work: from Nero’s reign onwards governors and benefactors paid to clear the silting harbour²¹.

The Christians were a small group in a big city. Quite how big is argued over; even the lowest modern estimates probably mean tens of thousands of people, and older figures run far higher²².

The one meeting place Acts names is the lecture hall of Tyrannus, and it has never been securely identified; even who Tyrannus was is unclear⁶. When Paul wrote 1 Corinthians from Ephesus, he sent greetings from Aquila and Priscilla²³, which tells us who was there but not where they gathered.

The church building most often linked with Christian Ephesus belongs to a much later age. The Church of Mary near the harbour was fitted into a long Roman hall, about 263 m by 30 m²⁴. It is usually dated to the early 5th century, though excavation suggests its dedication to Mary may be no earlier than about AD 500²⁵.

In Byzantine times Ephesus drew pilgrims above all to John’s tomb on Ayasuluk hill³¹, where Justinian built a domed basilica over the grave³²; the Basilica of St John still stands in ruins there. Two councils met in the city. The first, in 431, deposed Nestorius and upheld the title Theotokos for Mary³³. The second, in 449, was annulled at Chalcedon two years later³⁴.

Chalcedon also cost Ephesus its rank: canon 28 placed Asia under Constantinople, though the metropolitan still had some 36 bishops under him in the 6th century³⁵. Arab fleets raided the city from the 650s onwards³⁶, and the Seljuks captured it in 1090. Latin bishops held the see from 1318 to 1411, and in 1439 Mark of Ephesus led Orthodox opposition to union at the Council of Florence³⁷. By then Ayasuluk had been in Aydınid hands since 1304, when much of its Christian population was driven out, killed or enslaved³⁸, a turning point in the wider history of Ephesus.

A visitor can stand in the Great Theatre, identified with the theatre of the riot in Acts³⁹, see the remains of the Church of Mary in its Roman hall²⁴ and climb Ayasuluk to the crypt of John under the ruined basilica⁴⁰. The painted grotto and the tower wrongly called Paul’s prison belong to Paul’s years in Ephesus, and the wider map of scripture and tradition in the city to Sacred Ephesus.