I created an interactive map overlaying Apostle Paul’s 20,000km of journeys on a 1st century Roman Roads network, with modern vs. ancient cities and site photos. The base map utilizes the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire (DARE), which was embedded into ArcGIS, with all four of Paul’s journeys with every stop added. The Roman Roads map can also be switched to a modern map to compare the ancient vs. modern locations.
This is part of a personal project I am embarking on called Kingdoms Collide, where I plan to retrace every step of Paul’s journeys across the ancient Roman Roads.
Interesting. Is it possible to add what sources you use for each datapoint?
The Acts and Epistles of course (verse numbers would be nice), but you use more sources, right?
Not op, but Paul was on his way to persecute Christians when he was confronted by a vision of the risen Jesus.
Acts 9:15 – The Lord said to Ananias about Paul:
“This man is my chosen instrument to proclaim my name to the Gentiles and their kings and to the people of Israel.”
His mission to bring the Gospel to the Gentiles makes him a good choice for this work.
(Also not OP, so this is not speaking for them but speaking to the documentation.)
The more accurate answer is that Paul wrote (or was supposed to have written) a bunch of letters documenting his travels. The book of Acts (christian bible) also documents his travels. Note that multiple of the Pauline epistles are widely recognized to be forgeries written in his name.
The time of the other apostles post-New Testament is mostly accounted as tradition rather than written record. I'm not saying all, I'm saying most. I do not pretend to be an expert. There's no map to be made of the travels of Thomas, for example. Only the idea that he reached India (and maybe some other details that I'm leaving out). Or Jame-the-Just, who, as far as I can tell, might have gone to Rome but didn't travel the Mediterranean. The reason for his conversion has little to nothing why this is interesting (to me, to scholars, to people who aren't of the faith).
I've been reading a ton about the first two centuries of christianity for a couple of years and this is my current understanding. It's an exciting topic if you're a history nerd. Especially if you're an atheist who wants to better understand the formation of the dogma that you might have been taught as a child.
Apologies for stomping on your reply / reasoning. I don't agree with your answer. No harm intended.
There's a wide body of scholarship on who wrote each Epistle and when, no point trying to debate that here imo. I agree they weren't all written by him, but the seven that were are enough for decades of individual study and reflection.
In the ancient world, writing in the name of a respected teacher wasn’t always seen as fraud the way we think today. It could be seen as honoring a tradition — like continuing a school of thought under a founder’s name.
I don't think our replies negate each other, they seem complimentary to me.
Another aspect that's interesting is that his path covers most of the territory that was conquered by Alexander the Great, see Daniel 8-11. This Hellenistization and Paul's strength in Greek rhetoric, and 'dual' citizenship made him well suited for quickly spreading the gospel to these areas.
Jewish by birth and religion — giving him authority in synagogues, knowledge of Scripture, and credibility among Jews.
Roman by law and politics — granting him rights that protected him and enabled his mission across the empire.
This combination was rare and made Paul uniquely suited to bridge cultures: he could preach to Jews in their synagogues, debate philosophers in Greek forums, and stand trial before Roman governors.
I’ve been fascinated by the Roman Empire and their road network that was unprecedented at this time in history.
Paul was able to traverse thousands of miles along these networks and what he did really changed the course of history. He confronted the Roman Empire at its absolute height, and despite being shipwrecked twice, imprisoned at least three times, beaten and stoned many times… he still carried on. I thought it would be cool to visualize what he accomplished in a unique way.
I'd love to know the distance traveled by boat vs by.. foot? donkey? camel? Just boat vs non-boat would be interesting. But foot vs animal, if that data is even possible to figure out, would also be interesting.
I believe most of the journeys by land were done by foot. The Roman Roads were unprecedented in history at the time, especially by the 1st century, enabling someone like Paul to actually be able to traverse like he did.
I have plans to include the distances and approx. time for each of the legs.
Other - a bit more crunchy and modern board games that feature a little bit of Paul are Commissioned (2016) and The Acts (2018) & expansions - both games can be solo'd - good for personal immersion in the topic of church history, community building or friction.
I really love the way this is put together. This is a great way to illustrate someone's journey through life.
I am doing a similar project with family genealogy so it covers a longer span of time but the family connections to places become tangible. You really see how some people live out their entire lives in one small area while others hit the trails and find a way to prosper in some far-off locality. It especially stands out when you look at children and inheritances since the first-born son typically ended up with the father's best assets and other sons needed to find their own way with smaller parcels of land or almost nothing. Perhaps the most interesting part is discovering all the loops and intersections where a descendant ends up living or working in a town where an ancestor lived generations earlier without knowing anything about that ancestor. Feels like the circle is completed when someone later cycles back through and finds that they also like the place well enough to stay a while.
It really is a great project. It can also eat up a lot of time. I don't have much time for some of the kin to be able to see it since a couple are over 90 and several others are aged 80-90. Using photos and deeds and wills to correlate locations with addresses that have become something else can be tedious. Getting the written or spoken stories is a little easier if you can send some photos around and ask people to share stories about the subjects (homes, cars, people, events, etc)
I have taken a similar path to yours in that the location flags have links to photos relevant to that flagged location (home, farm, etc) so the experience of tracking a relative thru time is a little more rich for the young people who may never have met or heard of that person before they click the link. Tying things to contemporary newspaper accounts of the joys and tragedies of life that found these people adds another layer and helps reinforce the family lore about events or people.
I've always loved history. There's so much of it and every minute that passes just adds a little more flavor to the tale.
I'd recommend looking into adding a speculative final journey he might have taken to Spain. He mentions plans to go there in Romans, and other sources like 1 Clement and Jerome suggest he actually went there. The city of Tarragona has a tradition that he visited, as a speculative destination to map.
St. Paul (and his translators) are responsible for some of the most evocative turns of phrase I have ever encountered in literature. From 1 Corinthians 13:
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known."
Only in recent years have I appreciated how familiarity with such material so enriches my experience of other, later literature. To use this example, the title of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and its eponymous sentence (paraphrased):
How can we know the gods face to face, till we have faces?
One UI comment. I notice there is a legend under the map and callouts on the map to each of the four journeys. I wanted to see one of these switch the display to only show one journey at a time. Maybe the site does this and clearly on desktop, but I couldn’t intuit it on mobile.
I am still working on the legend and having it do exactly like you said. I have to change things up a bit but hopefully I can be able to implement it soon
I eventually figured it out I think.. A brief summary about Paul and his journey at the top would greatly improve the first impression of people adjacent to and outside of the target audience.
I’ve always thought it would be cool to build a side project like OpenStreetMap, where people can mark the places traveled by famous historical figures — kind of like what you did with Paul’s journey, but open to any historical figure. Do you know if there’s anything like that out there?
I don’t know of anything like that, but what a cool idea. I have a passion for the Silk Roads as well, and I made an interactive map for it. Soon I will add Marco Polo’s and Ibn Battuta’s routes to it. I really like historical journeys and how they intersect with the modern locations
Very interesting project! The Roman world really comes alive this this.
A pet peeve of mine though (and a bit OT):
I know it is not your fault, since this is inbuilt behavior, but I cannot for the life of me understand why almost all map widgets now have this behavior when as you are scrolling the whole page and happen to go over the map, suddenly the scrolling motion is used to zoom out the map, which thus quickly collapses into a thumbnail or a dot. It always drives me nuts when it occurs, a total fail of a UI/UX design. What was wrong with pinching to zoom out??
Not sure, but I think Google Map started this trend. I wonder if these map widget designers actually test the interaction with actual users.
The Roman Road network across the empire made it a reality, but I’m not sure how common it really was at the time, other than shorter commutes. The extent Paul did it was quite likely a very rare feat!
Great job. Was the the ESRI JS SDK used to make this, or some low code tool like StoryMaps? The ancient basemap alone is really cool, especially with the ability to toggle to present day.
Really cool project, bit hard to use on a mobile. Would love to have some background info about the whole things, never really got into Bible so being clueless probably adds to the confusion :D
Paul financially supported himself as a tentmaker (See Acts 18:3 - “There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, 3 and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them.”)
> ... in which missionaries support themselves by working full-time in the marketplace with their skills and education, instead of receiving financial support from a Church.
Professional surnames tend to reflect trades that were common when surnames were introduced to a culture. In English, that means ~1066. In Turkey, that means 1934. For whatever reason, there doesn't seem to have been a lot of tentmakers that established family names in England during the Norman Conquest. Not so in other places, though:
The Arabic surnames Kheyyam/Khayam/Khayami are all derived from the word for tent maker, Plachta is Polish, but more closely aligns with canvas-maker, mostly sails. And then theres Zeltman, which is German for tent man (which is ambiguous between "man who sells tents" and "man who lives in a tent")
Interesting. I’ve just gone down a rabbit hole and seen Thomas Jefferson call Paul the first corrupter of Jesus’ teachings and I’m seeing everything in a brand new way. It makes a lot of sense.
TIL Jefferson published his own "version" of the New Testament. [1]
> Jefferson mashed up/cut and pasted the New Testament to remove any references to the supernatural, or miracles, as well as the divinity of Christ. His title for the book was "The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth," which tells us a lot about his motivations.
It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.
I'm not really a believer or practicer anymore, but as someone who spent substantial time reading scripture when I was, I've thought a lot about what happens to Christianity if you discard the writings of Paul. If the namesake of Christianity satisfies the claims of the believers, that should be sufficient. Unfortunately, I believe that without Paul's writings, as well as the body of knowledge contained in extra-scriptural writings (commentary through history, catechisms, doctrine passed down by your local church, etc) Christianity pretty much falls apart.
Christianity as an imperial-aligned religion doesn't happen sure, but I'm not sure it falls apart. Jesuism or "The Way," looks a lot more like the Anabaptist traditions, Quakers, Liberation Theology, Christian Anarchism, and secular "Jesus as moral exemplar" movements.
As to the degree that these are falling apart is debatable. They certainly don't have the strong central hierarchy and universalism that Catholic and Protestant sects have, but they seem to endure.
Paul's letters are the earliest evidence of Christianity we have. The gospels weren't written until much later. It wouldn't surprise me if Paul's theology influenced what was written in the gospels.
> I've thought a lot about what happens to Christianity if you discard the writings of Paul.
Without Paul, Christianity reverts to being a variety of Judaism whose leader from the hinterlands got it right about what really mattered in life, as had his predecessors [0]. But he fatally misjudged the big city's religious oligarchs — vassals to their ruthless Roman occupiers — when he relentlessly attacked them and their cozy little setup; at their behest, he was executed by the Roman overlords.
Some [1] of the leader's later followers — his posse, if you will — imagined they'd seen him. But the leader's wealthy and/or well-connected followers are strangely absent from the narrative. Perhaps they had more information about what had really happened [2].
The early postmortem appearance tales eventually mutated into a legend of a warrior-king, raised from the dead — who would return Real Soon Now, to usher in God's reign and establish Israel's rightful place in Creation [3].
Over decades, the tales percolated into Mediterranean Graeco-Roman culture — eventually mutating further still into a tale of a divine being [4] (perhaps hybridized with that culture's myths?).
> It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.
It's interesting that every point of this narrative conflicts with the canonical accounts (even excluding the Pauline corpus for this purpose), in which Paul did encounter Jesus, and did at least spend time with (we aren't explicitly told it was spent in study, but presumably it was not exclusively in silent meditation) with disciples of Jesus between the encounter and conversion experience and the start of his ministry, and he got along as well with the other apostles as the other apostles they did with each other.
I chose the words carefully for that reason. The prophet of the nascent religion was a human being who was born, lived and died as a human being. Paul did not encounter this man. In his story, he encounters a divine being, and receives a private revelation (gospel) and mission that is distinct from the revelation and mission that the prophet in question gave as a human to his chosen students (apostles).
Paul is, in this terminology, also a prophet. He explicitly says the revelation he tells is not of human origin, and so not passed down to him through e.g. the ministry of one of the students (apostles) of the prophet in question.
It strikes me as unusual to have so much of the theology coming from someone who simply claims private revelation but is not the prophet in question and when the prophet explicitly chose disciples and set a ministry for them.
i often wonder this. how wasnt he robbed along the way? how didnt he starve to death. unless he was the calvin klein of tents, surely youd be working all day every day making tents just to survive, leaving no time for your spiritual whitecastle.
so hes either walking around with wads of cash or hes got a lot of friends along the way, but he did something like 10k miles, hed need a lot of friends. And also whats stopping a bandit taking all the cash?
I am pretty sure he talks about being robbed and also having times of starvation in one of his letters. I'm guessing his travels weren't very comfortable.
He was also a Roman citizen, so he could pull some privileges for free rides like getting to Rome through exercising his right to appeal directly to the Emperor
His main privilege was that petty local rulers were more reluctant to persecute him than they would a non-citizen.
Seneca’s brother, most well known as the recipient of Seneca’s letters, was one such judge who dismissed the charges against him when he found out that he was a citizen.
Acts is fiction (likely based on the epistles and Josephus). There are 7 undisputed Pauline epistles (though a few scholars even believe none of them are real - most recently Nina Livesey).
So his itinerary certainly wasn't as vast as depicted here (also, it's impossible). Itinerant preachers were supported by communities they preached to. Also, Paul is urging people to give money to his 'collection for the saints'. There is no word what happened to it (neither in Acts). Hmm...
There’s nothing in Acts that could be said to come from Josephus, what do you mean? Josephus does not mention Paul at all and has only a brief disputed reference to Jesus.
What I meant is that the author of Acts "borrows" themes from Josephus to create his story.
You can check out this interview with prof. Steve Mason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvfPxFQCpCU
Sometimes “themes” are just history repeating. There’s no evidence of this.
The timeline is also problematic because it’s entirely possible Acts was written first. Indeed IMO an earlier dating of Acts is pretty likely, the story is abruptly terminated after Paul has been in Rome two years with no natural conclusion, suggesting the narrative ended there because that took the author up to current events (60), where Josephus obviously wrote much later.
I don't think intent matters here, even if you are a true believer in AGI or GOD you are still a scammer. Work for your own money, don't take from others.
What motivated you to make this? It’s not entirely clear to me from looking over more of your site. Seems like a lot of effort unless you and your family are believers.
you dont need to be a "believer" to have interest in your culture and history. what we are in the west, our philosophy our way to see the world has been shaped directly from the ideas of people like Plato, Socrates and Paul.
let me tell you something, when you ask:
"What motivated you to make this? It’s not entirely clear to me from looking over more of your site. Seems like a lot of effort unless you and your family are believers."
you are projecting yourself into other person. that is the opposite of empathy.
for YOU is a lot of effort.
for YOU is only valuable for "believers" (whatever that even means)
for YOU also includes family believers....
dont you see? if you dont, no problem i understand. i just wanted to explain to you why are you downvoted, that's all.
I’ll be honest, I don’t understand much of what you’re trying to get across here. I don’t even know how empathy figures into it.
You could just let the OP choose to answer for themselves instead of getting offended on their behalf. So far, they’ve chosen not to answer, and that’s fine too.
This is part of a personal project I am embarking on called Kingdoms Collide, where I plan to retrace every step of Paul’s journeys across the ancient Roman Roads.