PAUL'S MANY ADVERSARIES IN EPHESUS
PAUL’S “MANY ADVERSARIES” IN EPHESUS
Virgil Warren, PhD
Introduction
“A wide, busy doorway has opened to me, but there are many adversaries” (1 Corinthians 16:9). That is how Paul sums up his situation in Ephesus as he writes westward across the Aegean Sea to Corinth in about A.D. 55. No one at the time could have envisioned the fate of these adversaries in comparison to the future of the Christian evangelization of Asia that Paul initiated from that center of influence. For two years and three months (Acts 19:8 + 10) he worked in and around Ephesus (cp. “three years” in Acts. 20:31). From there the gospel evidently radiated to surrounding cities like the seven in Revelation 1-3. (See Acts 19:26.) During his missionary endeavors in The Acts, Paul spent more time in Ephesus than anywhere else besides Antioch, his base of operation. So, we know about several “adversaries” he faced or would have faced during this period of his work.
The Adversaries
The Artemis Cult [Diana]
The first adversary in Ephesus is well-known to New Testament readers: the riot at the theater, where the citizens chanted for two hours, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians” (Acts 19:34). The episode reflects the long history of devotion to that pagan deity, whose largest center of worship stood in Ephesus. The Christian gospel could hardly avoid coming into conflict with the Artemis cult. From the comment of the town clerk (19:35-40), we might surmise that Paul’s strategy was not a frontal attack on this worship, but one that let its implications speak for themselves: “. . . these men . . . who are . . . not blasphemers of our goddess.” But the silversmiths claimed that—more true to character—Paul taught against at least idolatry in general: “This Paul . . . [says] there are no gods made with hands” (Acts19:26).
Modern archaeological attention to Ephesus did not begin until the British Museum commissioned an architect named John Wood to oversee the excavation of the site from 1863 to 1874. In the digging, by sheer chance he came across an imperial inscription of the Sacred Way, the route worshipers took in a procession from the temple of Artemis to the theater and back by a different route. Following the descriptions in the inscription, Wood located the foundations of the temple under twenty feet of debris.
At the time of Paul, the temple of Artemis was at least the fifth one erected on the site in her honor. The largest Greek temple in existence, it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world—about 225 ft. by 425 ft. Each of its 127 columns was over 6½ feet thick and more than 65 ft. tall. That huge structure reflected the enormous pride that area inhabitants took in being guardians of their patron deity.
John Wood also cleared the area where the theater had been cut into the western face of one of the hillsides that arose around the center of the city. The theater could seat 24,000- 25,000 people, the size of a modern college football stadium. The uproar noted earlier took place in that large arena.
Originally the main street of Ephesus ran from the theater to the harbor. Pliny says that the waves of the sea lapped against the foundations of the temple of Artemis/Diana (Natural History 2:201). These two points draw attention to how near the sea and harbor were to first-century Ephesus. Today, after centuries of silting up the harbor and nearby inlet from the Aegean, the sea lies four to five miles from the ancient ruins.
Pagan religious devotion in Ephesus went beyond devotion to Artemis. The people worshiped at least seventeen other deities in the city, particularly Hestia, the fire-goddess, and Serapis, the god of healing, along with Zeus, Apollo, and Cybele. As serious objects of worship, these deities may have had declining attention from the upper echelon of society, but they continued as a source of identity for the local population, hence, the next entry.
The Silversmith Guild
At the time of writing 1 Corinthians, the uproar led by Demetrius the silversmith had not yet taken place. The narrative of Acts adds the event to a statement about Paul’s intention to return through Greece and Macedonia on his way to Jerusalem with the subsequent prospect of traveling to Rome (19:21-22). Luke’s account reads as if his departure on this final journey took place soon after the riot subsided (20:1). Nevertheless, this explosive conclusion was surely preceded by less violent opposition by the artisans. The success of the Christian mission in the area threatened their very livelihood. The mission was succeeding so much that the purchase of silver shrines had fallen off enough to jeopardize the tradesmen’s financial security. Later, Paul’s second letter to Timothy, who was in Ephesus when Paul wrote to him, mentions a certain Alexander the coppersmith, who did Paul much evil (4:14 = 1 Timothy 1:20? but not 19:33). There may be some connection with the guild of artisans who made religious objects. The previous entry focused on the religious opposition in the uprising against Paul, but wrapped up with it was a socio-economic one for an influential segment in the city.
Evidently, none of the silver shrines have survived, although a number of terra-cotta (fired clay) ones have come down to us, those purchased by less wealthy devotees. The “shrines” were replicas of the shrine at Ephesus, which pilgrims took home for local use or left in the Artemissium for a sense of connection with the foremost manifestation of Artemis’ presence.
Spiritualism
Another aspect of the Ephesian setting was spiritualism and “the magical arts.” The account of that competitor for people’s attention begins in The Acts with the efforts of Sceva, a Jew and chief priest with seven sons as accomplices, to use Jesus as a name that had magic power for casting out demons (19:13-17). Instead of the positive miraculous effects in Paul’s ministry (19:11-12), the demon turned on these would-be exorcists, beat all of them up, and drove them out of the house naked and wounded. The contrasting consequences distinguished Paul clearly from such counterfeits. As a result, former practitioners of the magical arts brought a large cache of their literature and staged a public destruction of it (19:18-19). Luke’s record of the episode closes by echoing Paul’s indication to the Corinthians that the gospel was succeeding greatly even in the face of its opposition (19:20).
False teachers
When Paul convened the Ephesian elders in Miletus (Acts 20:17-38), he told them that false teachers would arise even from among them (20:30; cp. “false apostles” in Revelation 2:2). The false teaching evidently contained a Gnostic element. We make that surmise because of what Colossians—and to a lesser degree, Ephesians—and the other, Johannine writings seem to indicate. The Nicolaitans of Revelation 2:6 (cp. 2:15 in Pergamum) may have been a Gnostic-like sect which taught that since matter and spirit could not affect each other, the physical body could be used (sinful behavior) however a person desired without having any affect on the spirit. Salvation under this view meant being “saved” from an admixture of spirit and matter rather than from interpersonal alienation. Their later overt influence in the Christian community surely grew out of earlier activity within the church.
In writing to Timothy, who was in Ephesus, Paul mentions Hymenaeus and Alexander as men who “made shipwreck with respect to the faith,” whom he “delivered to Satan to learn not to blaspheme” (1 Timothy 1:20). Whether these remarks relate to the Gnostic problem we cannot ascertain, but they suggest that a Jewish-Gnostic-Christian sect may have grown in Ephesus over time as it had in Colossae (Colossians 2:16-23, etc.; cp. with 1 Timothy 1:3-4; 4:7; 6:3-5; 2 Timothy 2:23; 4:4). At any rate, false teachers of various stripes impeded the progress of the pure gospel that needed no further additions (Acts 20:27, “the whole counsel of God”).
In this case, the underlying “adversary” was syncretism, which has always been a threat when the gospel enters a new arena that has its religious and philosophical views firmly established. Rather than let go entirely of former beliefs, auditors try to “keep the best of” what they have and integrate the new into it (“putting new wine into old wineskins,” Matthew 9:17). That is what also happened with the Judaizers in the next category.
Jewish opponents
Throughout Paul’s missionary activities in the Gentile territories, fellow Jews were his most constant adversaries, whether they were unbelieving homeland Jews or local synagogue members (Acts 9:24; 13:44-51; 14:1-7, 19; 17:5-9, 13; 20:3; 23:12, 30; 25:3; 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16, etc.). Paul had to deal constantly with Judaizing teachers who followed him around the Mediterranean trying to persuade his Gentile converts that they additionally had receive circumcision and come under the authority of the Mosaic Law; that is, they had to accept Jewish national identity in becoming followers of the Jewish Messiah—they had to become Jews in the process of becoming Christians (Acts 15:1-35, etc.).
In Ephesus, Paul experienced opposition from disbelieving Jews soon after the initial conversion of a sizable membership of their local synagogue (Acts 19:9), so he met with the disciples separately in the school of Tyrannus. Beyond just “speaking evil of The Way” (19:8), according to his speech to the Ephesian elders, they laid plots against his life (20:19), although Paul does not elaborate and the record in Acts 19-20 does not refer to such activities.
Plain old egotism
John’s later years were spent outside Palestine among Christians of Ephesus particularly. He mentions Diotrephes, “who loves to have the pre-eminence among them” (3 John 9). We wonder how much of such behavior went unmentioned because even greater adversaries occupied the attention of New Testament writers.
Observations and Conclusions
With Jews and Greeks; pagans, Gnostics, spiritualists, and Jewish nationalists; former idolaters, immoral persons of every sort, not to mention power struggles brought about by personality clashes—it is hardly surprising that significant, adversarial relationships should have come about frequently, and that they arose outside as well as inside the body of Christ. Typical missionary problems like syncretism and apostasy are simply going to come up. At various times and places, those adversaries brought about social rejection, mental anguish, physical abuse, and political disenfranchisement. Ephesus was no exception to the resistance that the Gentile mission encountered in the Greek and Roman territories as well as in Palestine itself.
Some adversaries were unique to the apostolic age, but by and large the problems Paul faced in the “jewel of Asia” still exist. Only so many fundamental ideas are possible, so most of the ones we meet are essentially the ones the apostle encountered in the first generation of the church. We would think that the worship of Artemis would be an exception to that generalization, but our local newspaper carried an article by The Boston Globe writer Diane White: “New-Age Goddess Movement Goes Mainstream.”1 In the more extreme elements of the feminist movement, we find a new reason for the old yearning after female deity. The writer comments,
“Now, in the same room, they are invoking Artemis, the Greek moon goddess, hunter, protector of animals, perpetual virgin, and symbol of the first of the three faces of the Great Goddess: maiden, mother, crone.”
The article guessed that between 100,000 and 4,000,000 American women participate in such goddess worship. And they are not coming just from pagan America; they are coming from within bodies of Christians: Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, the United Church of Christ, Roman Catholics.
“Salvation” by secret knowledge (vs. interpersonal processes) may not exist today as formulated by ancient Gnostics that tried to syncretize it with Christianity to produce “Docetism.” Nonetheless, our world includes millions of adherents to Eastern religions that adopt something of the same attitude toward the material world as those in Paul’s day who taught that the material realm as such is to be depreciated, if not considered outright evil in contrast to spirit, which is good—in short, that good and evil are two types of substances rather than two patterns of behavior. Closer to home, we find the tendency to substitute correct doctrine for holy love as the mark of the “true” Christian.
Christianity is an exclusive religion; it cannot accept other belief systems as true or mix them with its own faith and practice. That inability to countenance runs against the grain of the modern Western mentality with its conviction that no viewpoint is objectively true; so all philosophies are merely conventional. In reaction to the exclusivism that Christians have sometimes applied to matters that scripture leaves indifferent, a sizable number who still identify with Christianity have joined in believing that tolerance is the ultimate virtue even within the church. God help us keep our balance in the shifting winds of social expectancy. We need not doubt that if we take an exclusivistic stance, we will have as many adversaries in our world as Paul had in ancient Ephesus.
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1The Manhattan Mercury, Sunday, March 31, 1996, E5.
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