Archaeology Gives New Reality to Paul’s Ephesus Riot

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Roman theaters were built on a giant scale. As common in the life of a Roman city as sports stadiums are in modern American cities, Roman theaters were used for dramas, musical performances, public events, religious observances and, yes, for blood-and-battle extravaganzas—wild animal hunts, gladiatorial fights and simulated naval battles. One of the most famous spectacles at one of the largest Roman theaters in the ancient world—the 25,000-seat theater of Ephesus—was an event for which the theater had not been built: a riot involving the apostle Paul.

The apostle Paul spent more than two years in Ephesus (Acts 19:8–10), a city mentioned more often in the New Testament than any other except for Jerusalem. With a population of perhaps 200,000 at the time, Ephesus was an ancient megalopolis that vied with Antioch as the third-largest city of the Roman world.¹ At the end of Paul’s tenure in Ephesus in 55 or 56 C.E., a business tycoon named Demetrius publicly accused followers of “the Way” (an early term for Christians)—and Paul in particular—of jeopardizing the prosperity, pride and even preservation of Ephesus. Revenues from silver miniatures of the Temple of Artemis were in decline, as was the reputation of the world-renowned Artemis cult. The undisputed greatness of Ephesus was itself allegedly imperiled by Paul and the Christians (Acts 19:27). Ancient and sacred values were under threat by new and alien elements, declared Demetrius, and025026 this not only in Ephesus but in the province of Asia beyond. His rhetoric appealed to cherished values and lurking fears. And it achieved its intent. The pent-up tinder in Ephesus was fanned into flame, propelling the volatile crowd “to run through the city quarters,” according to the longer Western text of Acts (from the fifth-century Codex Bezae, which preserves a text of Acts one-tenth longer than that of other New Testament manuscripts), and then into the great theater of Ephesus itself (Acts 19:28–29).

The riot in Ephesus is one of the longest and most suspenseful accounts in Acts. It contains a wealth of historical detail, some of which—proconsuls, standing courts and a city secretary—were common throughout the Roman Empire. But many more details—the immense temple commemorating the Artemis cult, the Artemis figure peculiar to Ephesus who was believed to have “fallen from heaven” (Acts 19:35), guilds of silversmiths, Asiarchs and the city of Ephesus itself: its greatness, its theater and its honor as neōkoros, “temple guardian”—all are unique to Ephesus and the Roman province of Asia.

The Austrian Archaeological Institute has been digging at Ephesus almost uninterruptedly for more than a century—since 1895. Ephesus is now the most thoroughly excavated archaeological site in Turkey. The composite excavations provide a remarkably full archaeological and inscriptional commentary on Luke’s account of the riot in Ephesus.

In 1984 a 3.5-foot-tall monument was discovered on the street (known in antiquity as the Plateia in Coressus) that connects the theater and stadium in Ephesus. The monument, today on display in the Ephesus Museum in Selçuk, Turkey, contains a 16-line Greek inscription that is a “silver mine,” so to speak, of evidence related to Acts 19:

Good Fortune! The silversmiths of the first and greatest metropolis of Asia, the thrice-honored temple guardian of the venerable Ephesians, erected (this monument to) Valerius Festus, the flower of his ancestors, creator of many027 works in both Asia and Ephesus, according to the heroic Antonines, who improved the harbor [of the Artemisium]. [Festus] has made himself savior and in all things a benefactor.

The reference to the Antonine emperors (who ruled in the second century: Antoninus Pius, 138–161 C.E., Marcus Aurelius, 161–180 C.E., and Commodus, 180–192 C.E.) reasonably dates the inscription to the late second or early third century. The inscription is not the work of a master craftsman, but it is clearly legible and nearly as clear in meaning. It informs us that a full century after Paul was in Ephesus, the silversmith guild still flourished, and that a certain Valerius Festus was “the flower of its ancestors.” The titles ascribed to Festus at the climax of the inscription—“savior” and “benefactor”—appear with reference to the emperor cult in the Roman East, as well as to many forms of social philanthropy. The indiscriminate use of these titles may be a reason why “savior” (Greek, sōtēr) occurs infrequently of Jesus in the New Testament and “benefactor” (Greek, euergetēs), an even more common epithet for self-interested public giving, never of Jesus.

Valerius Festus, who is otherwise unknown, is commemorated in the inscription for “making the harbor greater.” The Greek word kroisos, which I have translated “harbor,” refers to the outer colonnade of the Artemisium that bordered the harbor. It is unclear whether Festus improved the harbor itself, which during the Roman period needed regular dredging from silt deposited by the Cayster River, or expanded and improved the famous Artemisium adjacent to the harbor.

The original Temple of Artemis was built by King Croesus—famous for his Midas touch—in the sixth century B.C.E. That temple burned to the ground in 356 B.C.E.—on the very night (July 21), according to legend, on which Alexander the Great was born. The Ephesians reerected a new and greater temple in its place, which in the judgment of the Greek poet Antipater of Sidon (mid-second century B.C.E.) ranked as one of the Seven Wonders of the World. For good reason. Four times the size of the Parthenon in Athens and the largest building in the Hellenistic world, the 425-foot-long by 220-foot-wide foundation of the Artemisium supported a “forest” (to quote Pliny the Elder) of 127 marble columns that were 7 feet in diameter, 60 feet tall and crowned with Ionic capitals. The altar of the Artemisium was a masterpiece of the sculptor Praxiteles, the Michelangelo of the ancient world in terms of quality and volume of work.

Festus either “made greater” the Temple of Artemis or the harbor, which made the temple accessible to thousands of pilgrims from the ancient world. The silversmiths welcomed either improvement—for both enhanced access to the Artemisium028 and, with it, their sale of souvenirs. According to Luke, the souvenirs were “silver shrines of Artemis” (Acts 19:24). The word for “shrine,” naos in Greek, refers to the part of the temple where the image of the god was placed. The “shrines” were thus miniatures of the sanctuary where the colossal Artemis statue resided. Once purchased, the shrines were placed by devotees in the Artemisium as dedicatory offerings to propitiate the goddess. The value of the silver in the miniatures was considerable and would have been periodically melted down for its monetary return. This is presumably the reason why none of the miniature shrines has survived. A half century after Paul’s sojourn in Ephesus, Ignatius of Antioch wrote to the Ephesians, commending them for being steadfast “stones of a temple” (Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians 9.1). The Greek word Ignatius uses for “temple,” naos, is the same word used in Acts 19:24. By Ignatius’s day the Christian community in Ephesus had grown, and he used naos not with reference to the Artemisium, but as a metaphor of the church!

Luke does not record a visit of Paul to the Artemisium, but Paul’s teaching “that gods made with hands are not gods” (Acts 19:26) imperiled the reputation of the Temple of Artemis and the silversmith trade that profited from it (Acts 19:27). Paul’s ministry touched multiple nerves of Ephesus—religious, social and economic—all of which fueled the riot in the theater.

Ironically, the temple on which the fame of Ephesus chiefly depended was burned and destroyed by a Gothic naval invasion in 262 C.E. and never rebuilt. The lone reminder today of this Wonder of the World is a single column—rarely visited by modern tourists—reerected on the site of the Artemisium on the outskirts of modern Selçuk.

The grandeur of the Artemisium earned Ephesus the honorary distinction of “temple guardian.” “What human is there,” declared the city secretary in his attempt to quell the riot, “who does not know that the city of Ephesus is the neōkoros of the great Artemis who has fallen from heaven?” (Acts 19:35). The Greek word for “temple guardian,” neōkoros, also occurs in the silversmith inscription. Indeed, the inscription boasts of Ephesus as a three-time Temple Guardian. Neōkoros was a title unique to cities in the Roman province of Asia, bestowed during the Roman period when an especially magnificent temple had been built in honor of a patron-god or goddess—or of the emperor himself. The only other city in Asia to have attained the distinction of “three-time Temple Guardian” was Pergamon to the north.

We learn more about the Artemis cult from Luke than we do from the silversmith inscription. A cardinal feature of Ephesian Artemis, according to the city secretary, is that she had “fallen from heaven” (Acts 19:35). The origin of Ephesian Artemis is traditionally associated with a meteorite that was worshiped in early Ephesus. Some commentators assume that the secretary’s reference referred to a meteorite-icon of Artemis housed in the Artemisium.² Whatever the exact relationship, if any, between a meteorite and Artemis, the “many-breasted” Ephesian Artemis was a one-of-a-kind Artemis figure who incorporated and completed the ancient mother goddess cult, the roots of which extended back to the sixth millennium B.C.E. in Asia and Phyrgia. This great mother goddess was considered the tamer of all powers, especially the power of virility. The egg-shaped pectoral pendants on the famous statute of Ephesian Artemis make her the most curious of extant mother goddess statues. The pendants are often imagined to be breasts, but this is unlikely. Ancients knew well enough how to sculpt the female torso. No sculptor chiseled two dozen egg-shaped objects on the chest of a statue and expected them to be taken for female breasts. The earliest references to the pendants as breasts come from Minucius, Felix and Lactantius in the early third century in their Christian polemic against the heathen mother goddess, but two earlier Greek historians, Polybius (second century B.C.E.) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (first century C.E.), mention the pendants without identifying them as breasts.³ Subsequent explanations of the pendants include some form of breastplating, amber amulets such as have been retrieved from the Artemesium029030 or, more plausibly, leather goatskin pouches called kursas that symbolized fruitfulness in Anatolia.⁴

The most plausible explanation of the pendants in my judgment is that they symbolize the nature of the great mother goddess as the tamer of all powers, especially the power of virility. The pendants hang above a series of smaller animal figures on the lower part of the statue: three lions, three goats, three griffins, three lionesses, three gazelles and three bulls—eighteen figures total. Each of these animals represents power, speed and dominance. Ephesian Artemis, like her many and various mother goddess predecessors, was honored and served by self-gelded priests whose castration represented the ultimate subservience of masculinity to the divine feminine. A prominent symbol of virility in the ancient world was the bull. The pectoral pendants on the statue of Ephesian Artemis, especially in combination with the animal figures beneath them, may in fact represent bulls’ testicles as Artemis’s ultimate trophies in taming and subjugating the quintessential symbols of virility.⁵

The name by which the city secretary refers to Artemis may itself intimate this power, for the word diopetēs (Acts 19:35), rendered “fallen from heaven” in most English translations, literally means “fallen from Zeus.” Zeus was, of course, the supreme god, “father of gods and men.” Ephesian Artemis thus descended from Zeus, and—for the Ephesians at least—superseded031 him as the “mother of gods and men.”

Ephesians were quick to praise and defend their city. For two hours, reports Luke, pandemonium in the theater resounded with the cry, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.” The Western text (Codex Bezae) may again preserve the original reading of “Great Artemis of the Ephesians,” for this is the exact slogan of the Artemis cult frequently repeated in the inscriptional remains. The silversmith inscription begins with similar self-adulation: “The first and greatest of Asian cities.” The Greek word megalē—“great”—is a dominant adjective of Ephesus on Curetes Street, the chief thoroughfare of ancient Ephesus, as well as of its impressive remains today. In the barrel vaults beneath the ancient Temple of Domitian at the top of Curetes Street, no fewer than 5,000 monumental inscriptions are warehoused from the Ephesus excavations. The vast majority of them are unpublished, some perhaps even unread. Almost at random I read one addressed to Marcus Aurelius, the most famous of Antonine Roman emperors. The monument to him, in fact, was likely minted at approximately the same time as the silversmith inscription. Praise of Aurelius appears shamelessly boastful today—“godly, worthy of reverence, great, masterful.” It flows seamlessly, however, into accolades of Zeus and equally seamlessly to “the great city of Ephesus, the leading and great mother city of Asia, twice Temple Guardian.”

The dominant focus of Acts 19, as for modern visitors to Ephesus, is the great theater. A century ago one would have needed a trained archaeological eye to see anything other than a steep concave hillside where the theater stands today. In the intervening years, the hillside has been cleared of centuries of overgrowth, revealing the massive and magnificent proportions of the theater. The remains of the Ephesus theater, like those of most ancient theaters in modern Turkey, preserve Roman modifications of an earlier Greek theater.

Greek theaters were roughly horseshoe in shape with a circular orchestra as the focal point and a low stage beyond at the open end. Greek theaters were spaces for dramas, festivals, public entertainments and meetings, but not for violent combat.

Romans modified Greek theaters by reducing the horseshoe shape to a half-circle, and by connecting the two open ends of the half-circle by a straight skēnē, a stage with a back wall as high as the upper tiers of seats in the cavea. The resultant theater was thus high and enclosed. The theaters in Aspendos near Antalya in southern Turkey and in Orange, France, are two of the remaining Roman theaters with fully intact skēnai. The defined and enclosed space of a Roman theater intensified the drama presented therein. It would have had a similar effect with respect to the threat of the riotous crowd that surged into the theater with Paul’s two missionary companions, Gaius and Aristarchus. The final Roman modification was the replacement of the lowest two levels of seats by a protective wall separating orchestra from cavea, thus refitting the theater for violent combat of men and animals. If Paul’s reference to “combat with wild beasts in Ephesus” (1 Corinthians 15:32) is not a metaphor for various trials (as the same metaphor is in Ignatius, Romans 5.1), then Paul himself may have faced combat in the theater in Ephesus.

Paul wanted to enter the theater, but fellow Christians and “some officials of the province of Asia, who were friendly to him, sent him a message urging him not to venture into the theater” (Acts 19:30–31). The Greek word rendered “officials of the province of Asia” in Acts 19:31 is Asiarchs. This word occurs nowhere else in the Bible, but it occurs in more than a dozen inscriptions from Ephesus and beyond.⁶ I have personally located four occurrences of “Asiarch” in monumental inscriptions, two in the inscription depot beneath the Temple of Domitian and two more outside Ephesus. A pillar on the southeast staircase of the theater of Miletus, 30 miles south of Ephesus, bears the name “M(arcus) Antonius Apollodorus, the Asiarch.” Another in Perge, much further south and beyond Roman Asia, bears the name “Ter[tullus] the Asiarch.”

Especially in second-century inscriptions, “Asiarch” is often associated with the cult and frequently accompanied by archiereus, “high priest” (as in the Perge inscription), or even with the Artemisium, “Asiarch of the temple of Ephesus.” Such uses suggest that Asiarchs officiated at the imperial cult in Roman Asia. One such Asiarch, named Philip, let lions loose on Polycarp during his trial (Martyrdom of Polycarp 12.2). In Paul’s day the imperial cult had attained neither the definition nor level of antagonism that it would in the second century, however. In Acts 19:31, “Asiarchs” are actually called “friends of Paul,” warning him not to surrender himself to the crowd in the theater. These high civic officials should probably be understood in Acts 19:31 in accordance with epithets with which they are frequently paired in Greek inscriptions—as “philanthropists,” “benefactors” and “orators.” An inscription dated to 104–105 C.E., for example, mentions a certain Titus Flavius Pythio as “Asiarch, who was secretary for the second time.”⁷ The Greek word for “secretary,” grammtaeus, is the same word that Luke uses of the secretary who delivered the032 pacifying speech in Acts 19:35. The dozen-plus inscriptions of which I am aware all refer to Asiarchs in the singular, each accompanied by the personal name of its holder. Acts 19, by contrast, mentions Asiarchs in the plural and with no accompanying names. Does Luke leave Asiarchs unnamed, as he does the secretary in Acts 19:35, in the interests of protective anonymity?

Three further offices are mentioned in the uproar in the theater, all of which were common throughout the Roman Empire. The first, noted above, is grammateus (Acts 19:35). This is the only instance in the New Testament in which this word, which otherwise refers to Jewish scribes, is used of a secular Roman official, a city secretary,⁸ who seeks to pacify the crowd by both assurances and warnings. The secretary warns the crowd against unlawful “assembly” (Acts 19:32, 39, 40). The Greek word used for “assembly,” ekklesia, occurs only here in the New Testament in its classical sense of free men entitled to vote, in contrast to its more than a hundred references to “church” elsewhere in the New Testament. The term carries the exact historical connotation we would expect of a Roman official in the circumstance. The secretary further admonishes that “standing courts” (Acts 19:38, Greek, agoraioi)⁹ are available to adjudicate the complaints of Demetrius and the silversmiths. As a last result there is the authority of the anthupatos (Acts 19:38), the “proconsul” or “governor.” Asia was a senatorial province on the Aegean Sea. Along with the other provinces in what today is modern Turkey, Asia was a secured province, fully integrated into the Roman Empire. Less secure regions in the Empire—Palestine was such a region—fell under the direct jurisdiction of the Roman emperor as “imperial provinces,” as opposed to those like Asia that were under the authority of a deputy of the emperor, an anthupatos or a proconsul. The summons of a proconsul is calculated to signal the imminent peril of the uproar in the theater.

In 1890 William M. Ramsay, the eminent authority on the history and geography of Asia Minor, responded to an article by an English divine who contended that the account of the riot in Ephesus (Acts 19:23–40) was largely fabricated. The divine’s skepticism of the historical merit of the account, as of the Book of Acts as a whole, was typical of the late 19th century and much of the past century. Ramsay marshaled evidence and countered that Luke’s account was not a fabrication but “vivid and true to the situation and surroundings” of ancient Ephesus. He expressed the further hope that points062 still disputed would be resolved by future discoveries at Ephesus.¹⁰ Thanks to a century of excavation, above all to the Austrian Archaeological Institute that began its long and fruitful work at Ephesus only three years after Ramsay’s article, the wealth of ensuing data corroborates Ramsay’s claim that Luke’s account is “vivid and true to the situation and surroundings.” Some 18 historical references or terms occur in Acts 19:23–40. Apart from the personal identities of Demetrius and Alexander, all these references and terms are repeated and reported in the archaeological or inscriptional remains of Ephesus, affording a remarkably complete “material commentary” on the riveting drama.

The composite evidence indicates that the Christian “Way” was not a hermetic sect paddling small circles in backwaters of the ancient world, but a movement plunged into the mainstream and public domain of Ephesus. Luke knew what he was talking about in recording the riot in the theater. His claim at the outset of the two-part work (Luke and Acts) to have “investigated everything accurately and reported them orderly” (Luke 1:3) is substantiated in Acts 19. Important in the two-part work is the necessity of bearing credible witness (Luke 21:13; 24:48; Acts 1:8; 5:32). The archaeological and inscriptional remains of Ephesus allow modern readers to appreciate the credibility with which Luke’s account would have been read by first-century citizens of Ephesus and Roman Asia.

How accurate is Luke’s account of the Ephesus riot described in Acts 19:23–41? Excavations at the site bring this Biblical event to reality in a new way—from inscriptions and figurines of the goddess Artemis to the theater where the riot took place.