A host-run Sunday school game for Coptic Orthodox Grade 8, Building Block 9, lesson 9.7, How to Witness to Christ in a Non-Christian World. Every city St. Paul went to sits on a major Roman road, or at a major seaport, or in a great trading centre, or at a centre of migration. He knew the spread of Christianity depended on getting it to those places. The map shows the roads and the sea lanes. It does not show you how far each city reaches — work that out from what is written on it.
Syria · Roman road, Seaport at Seleucia, Trading centre
The third city of the empire — hundreds of thousands of people, behind only Rome and Alexandria. Greeks, Syrians and Jews living in the same streets, a harbour sixteen miles down the road, and the caravan routes out of Persia ending here. There is a synagogue. There is also a Greek street where nobody has ever heard of Moses. And there is already a church.
Cyprus · Island port
An island with a working harbour, Jewish communities with synagogues in the towns, and a Roman proconsul holding court at the other end of it. It is also Barnabas’s home — he was born here, and everyone on the island knows his family.
Galatia · Via Sebaste, Roman colony
A Roman colony planted deliberately on the Via Sebaste, the imperial highway through the highlands. Retired legionaries, Latin-speaking officials, and a synagogue with a row of Greek God-fearers sitting at the back of it who came for the one God and never took the last step.
Lycaonia · Off the highway, No synagogue
Farm country. They speak Lycaonian in the street, not Greek. There is no synagogue at all — no Scriptures, no Moses, no prophets, nothing to quote. When Paul heals a lame man the crowd decides on the spot that he and Barnabas are Hermes and Zeus walking around in human bodies, and the priest of Zeus turns up at the gate with oxen and garlands to sacrifice to them.
Mysia · Port, The crossing to Europe
A harbour town with nothing much to recommend it except which way the boats point. Everything that leaves here lands in Europe.
Macedonia · Via Egnatia, Roman colony
A Roman colony full of retired legionaries who are extremely proud of being Roman, sitting on the Via Egnatia. So few Jews live here that there is no synagogue — just a handful of women who meet by the river to pray.
Macedonia · Via Egnatia, Seaport, Provincial capital
The capital of Macedonia, sitting on the Via Egnatia — the road that runs from the Adriatic all the way to Byzantium — with a working harbour underneath it. Everything and everyone in the province passes through this city on the way to somewhere else.
Macedonia · Off the main road
A smaller town, off the highway, with nothing strategic about it at all. He only comes here because he had to leave Thessalonica in the dark.
Achaia · Famous, Past its prime
The most famous city in the world, and about four hundred years past its best. Full of philosophers, Epicureans and Stoics, and of people who — Acts says it out loud — “spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing” (17:21). It is not a port that matters, not a road that matters, and not a trading hub. It is a reputation.
Achaia · Two seaports, Trading centre, Migration hub
A boomtown rebuilt from scratch by Rome, with two harbours on two different seas and a stone slipway between them, so that a cargo crossing the Mediterranean crosses this isthmus rather than sailing round. Sailors, freedmen, immigrants, new money. The city’s reputation is so bad that the Greeks made a verb out of its name for living filthily.
Asia · Provincial capital, Great harbour, Pilgrim trade
Capital of the province of Asia, a great harbour, and the Temple of Artemis — one of the seven wonders of the world — with an entire economy of silver shrines and pilgrim traffic built on top of it. It is also a city that runs on lectures: public halls, hired speakers, an audience that turns up.
Italia · Every road, A million people, The capital
A million people and the centre of the known world. Whatever is true in this city is true everywhere within a year, because every road on the map ends here and everybody eventually comes.