Paul lived and taught in Ephesus for between two and three years in the mid-50s AD1, dates that scholars reconstruct rather than read off a record2. Acts gives him three months in the synagogue and two years in the lecture hall of Tyrannus3, and it was during this stay that he wrote 1 Corinthians4. It ended after a riot of silversmiths in the city’s theatre5.

Two visits and a long stay

Paul came to Ephesus twice. The first visit, at the end of his second journey, was short: he spoke in the synagogue, declined to stay, left Priscilla and Aquila behind and sailed on with a promise to return8. The second was the long stay, conventionally dated to the mid-50s AD, with published ranges running from about AD 52–55 to 54–572.

Its length is given two ways. Acts gives three months and then two years3, yet when Paul later spoke to the Ephesian elders he said he had warned them for three years. The usual explanation is that the months in the synagogue, the two years in the hall and further time in the province were counted inclusively as about three years1.

  1. End of the second journeyA brief visit; Priscilla and Aquila stay in Ephesus8
  2. Before Paul returnsApollos teaches in the city9
  3. Mid-50s ADThree months in the synagogue, two years in the hall of Tyrannus32
  4. During the stay1 Corinthians is written4
  5. The end of the stayThe silversmiths’ riot5
  6. AfterwardsPaul leaves for Macedonia, later calling the Ephesian elders to Miletus6
Curetes Street climbing between re-erected columns and carved blocks under a deep blue sky
Fig. 1 Curetes Street climbing between re-erected columns and carved blocks under a deep blue sky. Archive photograph (1992).

Christians before Paul

Paul did not bring Christianity to Ephesus; he found it there. Between his two visits Apollos, a Jew from Alexandria, was teaching in the city, and Priscilla and Aquila took him in hand, so a community of believers was in place before the long stay began9. The couple were still at Paul’s side when he wrote to Corinth, and he passes on their greetings with those of the churches of Asia4. Timothy’s name also belongs here: 1 Timothy has Paul urging him to stay on in the city, and a later tradition made him its first bishop10.

The hall of Tyrannus

After three months, Acts says, Paul stopped speaking in the synagogue and taught instead in the school of Tyrannus, every day, for two years3. The building has never been found. Who Tyrannus was is equally uncertain: a teacher, the owner of the hall, or simply its name11.

One early form of the text adds a detail that the standard text lacks. The “Western” text of Acts, preserved in the 5th-century Codex Bezae, says Paul used the hall from the fifth hour to the tenth, roughly 11 am to 4 pm, the hours of the midday rest12.

Acts also reports that converts who had practised magic brought their books out and burned them in public, and that the books were valued at fifty thousand pieces of silver13.

The riot in the theatre

The riot began with money. Demetrius, whose workshop turned out silver shrines of Artemis, gathered the craftsmen and told them that Paul’s preaching, that gods made with hands are not gods, threatened both their trade and the majesty of the goddess14. The mob dragged two of Paul’s travelling companions, Gaius and Aristarchus, with them into the theatre15. There they shouted for about two hours. In the King James Version the cry is "Great is Diana of the Ephesians"5.

Paul wanted to go in. The disciples kept him back, and so did some of the Asiarchs, officials of the province who were friendly to him15. Acts puts Paul outside the theatre, not on its stage. In the end the town clerk calmed the assembly, reminding it that Ephesus was keeper of Artemis’s temple and of the image that fell from heaven16, and warning that the city could be charged with rioting17.

That theatre is identified with the Great Theatre of Ephesus18, though the crowd did not fill the building seen today. Its auditorium was enlarged in stages from the 1st century AD into the first half of the 2nd, and only then did it approach 150 m across19.

Visitors in the orchestra and curved seating of the Great Theatre
Fig. 2 Visitors in the Great Theatre.

Letters written from Ephesus

1 Corinthians is the letter Paul plainly wrote in Ephesus. In it he says he will stay there until Pentecost4. The same letter holds his remark that he had “fought with beasts at Ephesus”, and 2 Corinthians speaks of an affliction in Asia so heavy that he despaired of life; whether the beasts were real animals or human opponents is debated, and the phrase is often read figuratively20.

Those verses feed a larger argument. Some scholars hold that Paul was imprisoned at Ephesus, although Acts never says so, and that he wrote Philippians or Philemon, perhaps also Colossians, from a cell in the city. Most still favour the traditional view that these letters came from Rome, and the question remains open21.

The letter to the Ephesians is a different puzzle. It names Paul as its author, but its authorship is among the most debated in the New Testament: surveys of scholars range from roughly even to a majority against22. The words “in Ephesus” in its opening verse are missing from the earliest and best manuscripts, it greets nobody by name, and it reads like a circular letter meant for several churches23.

Did Paul go to prison in Ephesus?

No ancient text says so, and Acts is silent on any imprisonment in the city24. An Ephesian imprisonment is a scholarly hypothesis, put forward to explain where some of his letters were written, and it has no evidential link to any building25.

That matters because a tower above the old harbour is still pointed out as “St Paul’s Prison”. It belongs to the Hellenistic city wall and survives unusually well, with internal partitions and a second storey; an inscription inside names an "Astyages hill"26. Nothing ancient or archaeological connects Paul with it. The story sometimes told on site, that he was held there before being sent to Rome, has no basis: his journey to Rome began from Caesarea24.

Farewell at Miletus

After the riot Paul left for Macedonia. On his way back to Jerusalem he bypassed Ephesus and summoned its elders to Miletus for a farewell address6. It was there that he reminded them of his three years among them1.

The great theatre of Miletus with its curved seating and the plain beyond
Fig. 3 The theatre at Miletus.

The Grotto of St Paul

The Grotto of St Paul is a small cave church on the north face of Bülbüldağ, the mountain that rises south of the ancient city, and Christians worshipped in it from late antiquity into the 19th century27. It is a long, narrow gallery, about 15 m deep, 2 m wide and 2.3 m high, widening towards the back28.

The paintings came to light in 1998, when Renate Pillinger, an archaeologist at the University of Vienna, found them beneath later layers of whitewash. The best known shows Paul teaching; Thecla follows his words from a window, and her mother Theocleia watches, all three named in painted Greek29. The scene follows the apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, and Pillinger dates it to about the end of the 5th century7. Other paintings and graffiti in the cave range from about the 4th–5th century to the 12th–13th30. The excavator described the find as the first archaeological evidence for the veneration of Paul at Ephesus: evidence of his cult, centuries later, rather than of his presence7. Conservation took ten years, from 2000 to 2010, carried out by the Austrian Archaeological Institute with Pillinger and with Johannes Weber of the University of Applied Arts Vienna31.

Wall painting of St Paul, labelled ΠΑΥΛΟΣ, raising his hand and holding a book, Grotto of St Paul
Fig. 4 St Paul in a surviving wall painting in the Grotto of St Paul.

Where to see Paul’s Ephesus today

Of the places Acts names, only the theatre can be pointed to with confidence18; the synagogue and the hall of Tyrannus are lost11. The theatre stands inside the ancient city, and the painted grotto lies on the slope of Bülbüldağ to the south27. The goddess whose trade was at stake was worshipped outside the walls, at the Temple of Artemis. Paul left behind a community whose later story, from Revelation to the councils, is told in The church of Ephesus, one part of the wider sacred Ephesus.

The Commercial Agora under the hills on a hazy day
Fig. 5 The Commercial Agora under the hills on a hazy day.
Sources (37)

Each source is listed once. The numbers link back to the claims it supports; dates show when the source was checked.