House of Gold

Patrick Comerford

St Paul’s Ephesus: Texts and Archaeology, by Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Liturgical Press/Michael Glazier, 289 pp, $29.95, ISBN 978-0814652596

Strolling down the paved Priests’ Way, or Curetes Street, in Ephesus at the height of the summer, our guide happily pointed out the vista ahead of us, including – in his own words – the “Library of Celsius”. Well it was a scorching hot day –  and given the decadent reputation of Ephesus at the height of its prosperity I have no doubt the library shelves once held some hot topics.

 

Ephesus is one of the most stunning and intact archaeological sites in the Eastern Mediterranean. Pompeii aside, it is the largest and best-preserved ancient city in the Mediterranean, and after Istanbul the most popular tourist site in Turkey. The city owed its early growth and prosperity to its proximity to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World – according to Pausanias, it was the largest building of the ancient world – where the Greek goddess Artemis and the Anatolian goddess Cybele were worshipped.

 

Today its most inspiring wonders are the Theatre, where Saint Paul preached, and the Library of Celsus, built ca 110-135 AD by the consul Gaius Julius Aquilus in honour of his father, Julius Celsus Polemaenanus. The library is a magnificent and imposing two-storey building with a finely-crafted facade, four niches for statues personifying Virtue, Wisdom, Fate and Genius – long removed to Vienna – a spacious paved courtyard, and reading rooms with cavities to keep over 12,000 papyrus scrolls. The building faced east so that the reading rooms could make the best use of the morning light.

 

Ephesus is of particular interest to Christians because of its associations with the Apostle Paul, who made it the second major centre of his missionary work, after Corinth. He spent two or three years there between 52 and 54. He wrote at least one Letter to the Church in Ephesus – his Epistle to the Ephesians, probably from prison in Rome – while his letters from Ephesus make his time there the best documented period of his career. Ephesus was equidistant from his churches in Achaia, Macedonia and Galatia, and from there he wrote his Epistles to the Galatians, Philippians, Colossians, Philemon, his First Letter to the Corinthians, and a lost Letter to Laodicea. Some were written from his prison cell in a tower near the western end of the city walls.

 

Now one of the best-known Pauline scholars has given us the definitive guide to the Ephesus of Saint Paul. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, who has been Professor of New Testament at the École Biblique et Archéologique Française in Jerusalem since 1972, is one of the most eminent and distinguished Irish biblical scholars and has an unrivalled international reputation. With more than a dozen books to his name, hundreds of scholarly articles and contributions to encyclopedias and reference works, he occupies the commanding position in the field of Pauline studies. A cousin of Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor of Westminster, he has been a visiting professor and lecturer around the world from Harvard and Georgetown to Sydney and Melbourne, Dublin, Maynooth, Cork and Limerick.

 

Born James Murphy-O’Connor in Cork in 1935, he was educated by the Christian Brothers in Cork and at Castleknock College, Dublin, before joining the Dominicans. On entering the novitiate in Cork in l953 he took the name Jerome, after the patron saint of biblical studies. He went on to study philosophy and theology in Tallaght and at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and was ordained a priest in 1960. His postgraduate work was on the preaching in Saint Paul, which was developed into a doctoral thesis supervised by Ceslas Spicq. He received his doctorate in theology (ThD) summa cum laude in l962.

 

After further work in Rome, Heidelberg and Tübingen, he went to Jerusalem to the École Biblique, and became a lecturer there in 1967, the year of the Six Days War. Since then, the École has been his religious, scholarly and personal home for more than forty years, with the Holy City and the Holy Land the centre of his life and work. The École Biblique was founded in 1890 by French Dominicans; it soon became a world-class centre for biblical studies and archaeology; the first great modern Catholic translation of the Bible, the Jerusalem Bible, was translated and edited there.

 

The young Murphy-O’Connor began his work in Jerusalem as the importance of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in a cave near Qumran in 1947 was still being debated. His contribution to the debate was to argue that Essene influence was more evident in the extra-Palestine writings of the New Testament, such as the Pauline letters, and much less evident in the writings from within Palestine, such as the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). After the Six Days War, he organised archaeological visits and lectures for United Nations personnel in 1970 and soon after he become the leader of the École’s own archaeology programme, leading to an invitation from Oxford University Press to write The Holy Land: An archaeological guide. This was published in 1980, was translated into several languages with revised editions in l986 and 1992, and has become the standard guide-book. Dr Murphy-O’Connor has been strongly critical of the political use of archaeology by the Israeli authorities, especially on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. He has also been a valued resource and friend to visiting English-speaking journalists, as I first found in 1987, and as many of my former colleagues appreciated during the Millennium and at the time of the visit of Pope John Paul II.

 

For most of his career, the Apostle Paul has been at the centre of Dr Murphy-O’Connor’s work, in which he has explored the existentialist relevance of Paul for contemporary life. Categories such as authentic and inauthentic existence and alienation shed light on the Pauline categories of grace, freedom and sin. For Paul, according to Dr Murphy-O’Connor, true freedom is very much a community reality; this constrasts with the more individualist accents of other biblical scholars. “Freedom in community” has been described as a useful summary of his reading of Paul, but also expresses his exploration of life in his own religious community, the Dominicans.

 

His earlier study Saint Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology (Glazier, 1983, revised and expanded 1992 and 2002) demonstrated his skills in moving between text and context with passionate attention to detail. His St Paul the Letter Writer: His World, His Options, His Skills (Liturgical Press, 1995), and its successor, Paul, A Critical Life (Clarendon Press, 1996) were widely acclaimed by reviewers and welcomed both by professional colleagues and the general reader. His commentaries, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Glazier, 1979), and The Theology of the Second Letter to the Corinthians (Cambridge University Press, 1991), and 1 Corinthians (Doubleday, 1998), cemented his reputation as one of the most distinguished commentators on the Corinthian letters.

 

Now, in this splendidly written and produced book, he has turned his attention to the Ephesus of Paul. He summarises and presents the works of twenty-six ancient writers, from the beginnings of the city to the biblical period. Dr Murphy-O’Connor has taken a different approach to editing and presenting readers with his selections on Ephesus than that he has used in the past in presenting Corinth. Despite the reputation he earned with St Paul’s Corinth: Texts and Archaeology, he now regrets the approach he took in that volume, where the authors were presented in a chronological order he tried to establish. “On reflection I find this to be rather meaningless, since each one covers material from different ages. The latest author in date may deal with the earliest historical period.”

 

The historians he has chosen to introduce us to Ephesus include Strabo, Appian, Caesar, Cicero, Herodotus, Ignatius of Antioch, Flavius Joseph, Livy, Pausanias, Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Plutarch, Seneca and Tacitus. There are poets and novelists too, including Antipater of Sidon, Callimachus, Philostratus and Xenophon of Ephesus. There are breathtaking accounts that bring to life the houses, shops and monuments, as well as the Temple of Artemis of . There are engaging accounts of the public baths, the harbour life, the lives of slaves, the visits of Pompey, Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the food, the medicine, the tragedies and the wine, good and bad.

 

Each section opens with a brief presentation of a writer’s life, but also questions whether that writer actually visited Ephesus. Lengthy quotes are then followed by considered, scholarly comments, aimed at heightening the intelligibility of the text, yet raising critical questions about the reliability and completeness of the information, and asking, for example, whether Hannibal visited Ephesus as Appian claimed.

 

Dr Murphy-O’Connor’s opening chapter is chosen from Strabo, the geographer and historian, who described the temple and cult of Artemis after visiting Ephesus. He opens with Strabo because he was writing just a generation before Paul and because his lengthy account touches on all the significant aspects of life in Ephesus and is the best introduction to the different facets of the city’s life. Strabo was sceptical of Pliny’s claims that Ephesus had been founded by the Amazons, but still found time to enjoy the wine on Samos – an experience shared almost two thousand years later by Byron when he wrote:

 

In vain – in vain: strike other chords;

Fill high the cup of Samian wine!

Leave battles to the Turkish hordes,

And shed the blood of Scio’s vine!

Hark! rising to the ignoble call –

How answers each bold bacchanal!

 

But Strabo’s observation that the wine from the Ephesus region “has been found to cause headache” and “has also proved to be unwholesome” seems in some sad way to be true to this day. It is unfathomable that a region that can produce such good olives, figs and dates, with the most appropriate soil and weather, has still not managed to make wine that matches that on neighbouring Greek islands.

 

Even among the ancients, sex and politics, temptation and religion, come together in a cocktail that has been commonly tasted for generations. From Plutarch we hear the story of one conqueror who, on “seeing the priestess of Artemis surpassingly beautiful in her appearance, he straightaway marched forth from Ephesus for fear that even against his determination he might be constrained to commit an unholy act”. Dr Murphy-O’Connor admits that this may be a rare if not unique renunciation of the droit de seigneur, but it is a story that highlights the awe in which the Temple of Artemis of was held.

 

The destruction of the first Temple of Artemis of was believed to have taken place on the night Alexander the Great was born in the year 356 BC. The restoration may have begun almost immediately, and work on the new temple was still in progress when Alexander arrived in Ephesus in 334 BC.

 

Ephesus was the sea terminus of the the royal road, the western terminus of the “common highway” and the gateway to Asia and to all points further east, so that the visitors who passed through included emperors and traders, writers and charlatans, preachers and runaway slaves, the curious and those who could only tarry a while. Mark Antony became so besotted with Cleopatra while he was here, Dio Cassius tells us in his Roman History, “he gave not a thought to honour but became the Egyptian woman’s slave and devoted his time to passion with her. This caused him to do many outrageous things, and in particular to drag her brothers from the temple of Artemis at Ephesus and put them to death.” Others, including Josephus, tell us that he killed her sister Arsinoe.

 

As the Temple of Artemis of grew in prosperity and popularity and its reputation spread throughout the classical world, it became something of a pre-Christian ecumenical, interfaith centre of pluralism, where Artemis or Diana was central to worship but where the cult of other deities, including the emperor, was tolerated and encouraged. The cultic religious practices were combined with an eclectic superstition that often was misunderstood by visitors or beyond their understanding, so that words and verses that may once have had liturgical significance in the Artemision were later dismissed as magical formulas, used only to ward off evil spirits, so that in antiquity all superstitious but unintelligible spells became known as “Ephesian letters”.

 

The Artemision also served practical, political and social uses, so that when Mark Antony paid his respects to Artemis, he was surprised to find that some of his old enemies had taken refuge in the Temple, for it was not only a centre of cultic worship but had also become a sanctuary.

 

Yet the temple was so rich and well-endowed that Aristophanes described it as “the house of gold”. Its great landholdings and fishing rights produced immense revenues and its wealth outstripped the income needed for its upkeep. Is it any wonder that it became the treasury for western Anatolia, “the general bank of Asia” and “the general treasury of Asia”, as Aelius Aristides and Julius Caesar tell us? The temple banks however never committed serious funds to commercial loans or other hazardous forms of credit. “Mortgages and blue-chip investments were their traditional market. The money of the goddess was not to be gambled with,” Dr Murphy-O’Connor tells. Would that the priests of Mammon had been as wise in recent decades.

 

Not surprisingly, though, the temple attracted the attention of those desperate for money but devoid of religious scruples. When Scipio attempted to plunder it of its treasures, he was saved only because his daughter was married to Pompey. Mark Antony stole from the Temple, and Augustus had to make restitution. On two occasions only the fortuitous arrival of Julius Caesar prevented theft. With open thievery and creeping corruption, it is no surprise, therefore, that Appolonius of Tyana found the temple was “just a den of robbers” – a phrase that evokes biblical images provided by Old Testament prophets (see Jeremiah 7:11) and in the New Testament by Christ himself (see Mark 11:17 and parallels).

 

The historians and writers give us descriptions of the daily life and the everyday food of the people of the city, which often moved from luxury to opulence. It was so prosperous that it became a symbol of luxury and “excelled in perfumes”, although standards dropped later. Athenaeus found the mussels eaten in Ephesus to be better in flavour than the scallops but inferior to the cockles. Ephesians’ luxury goods, imported from as far away as Persia, included garments dyed with violet, crimson and yellow, and others with sea purple. Vermillion was said to have been discovered in the Cilbian fields of Ephesus, and there was an extravagant and excessive display of opulence and wealth in the city that some regarded as vulgar. Clearchus records in his Lives that the Ephesian painter Parrhasius “dressed himself in purple and wore a gold crown on his head … [and] indulged in luxury in a way offensive to good taste and beyond his station …”

 

At a domestic level, we know that the houses of Ephesus were not superior to those of Sardis in size and quality, explaining why, as Vitruvius notes, foreign architects were employed in building the temple of Artemis, including Cherisophon of Knossos on Crete and his son Metagenes. Pliny the Elder describes the building of the temple and its site, its columns and its platform, with extraordinary detail, even down to the marble and timber used, and the size and detail of the staircase, which he believed to have been made from a single vine that had grown to an exceptional height in Cyprus.

 

Philostratus gives extensive descriptions of the city’s baths, which were the social centres “in which friends met, exchanged gossip, and did deals”. There were no less than three bathing palaces, which occupied over twenty acres of the urban landscape. They “met the need satisfied by bars and cafés today; they facilitated social contact. Many attended the baths daily and spent the greater part of their leisure time there.” The public baths put personal hygiene on the daily agenda and within the grasp of the poorest. We are given few of the lurid details about the public latrines and the brothels of the city, which are popular pedalled by tour guides throughout the tourist season.

 

From a cultural perspective, Ephesus was also the birthplace of Zenodorus of Ephesus, who founded the Library of Alexandria around 284 BC and who produced an early critical edition of Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey. It is surprising, therefore, that no ancient novelist ever set a story in the city. Ephesus nevertheless figures prominently in a series of novelistic works, such as The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon, a romantic novel by Achilles Tatius of Alexandria in circulation in the late second century AD. While novelistic works like these sought to provide realistic background to enhance their appeal, their revelations also introduce us to popular perceptions of the city in a golden age.

 

Dr Murphy-O’Connor next leads us through Paul’s Ephesus, giving an account of his activities in a city that was once the largest port in the classical world. We are taken on a walk with the apostle through Ephesus in the year 52 AD, along the common highway of Strabo, through the Magnesia Gate and then on a ten-minute stroll into the State Agora. A helpful plan of central Ephesus ca 50 AD makes this easy to imagine in the mind’s eye. Our attention is drawn to the private houses, which have been excavated in recent years. Perhaps his friends Prisca and Aquila lived in a dwelling similar to the large houses we are invited to imagine in text and through plans. These were more luxurious than those inhabited by people of similar status in Rome, extending in size from 370 to 650 square metres, often with a kitchen, two dining rooms, a sitting room, vestibule or atrium, furnace, bath, and perhaps even a shallow pool.

 

Using the texts of the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline letters, we are introduced to the details of Paul’s career in Ephesus, his conflicts with the small Jewish community and the synagogue, his dialogue with the small Jewish group led by Apollo of Alexandria, who appear to have been disciples of John the Baptist, his debates in the square, the agora and the theatre, and his penalising clashes with the guild of silversmiths.

 

Paul’s church in Ephesus was so successful that it became a source of missionary expansion of the early church, extending its outreach to neighbouring cities in western Anatolia and even into the Anatolian heartland. The leading members ranged from Lydia, an energetic, enterprising and wealthy textile merchant or seller of purple dye, to Onesimus, a runaway slave. The earlier stories of slaves finding sanctuary in the Artemesion have made it difficult for most Christian commentators to resist the temptation to identify Onesimus, who was converted by Paul and is the subject of his Epistle to Philemon, with the Onesimus who later became bishop of Ephesus and is named by Ignatius of Antioch. Leaving Ephesus was a heart-breaking experience for Paul. With Dr Murphy-O’Connor’s description of the city it is not difficult to understand why.

 

Apart from the writers selected for this presentation, our principal source of knowledge of life in Ephesus is provided by the work of Austrian archaeologists who have been working there since the late nineteenth century, most notably under Gustaf Adolf Deissmann, a New Testament professor. We have no choice now but to accept the Austrians’ interpretations and their presentations of Ephesus, as they say it once was. But they also show up the failure of Irish archaeological faculties to engage with even one key biblical or classical site, and constantly show the inadequacy of Turkish tour guides.

 

It has been my constant frustration to find that I am taken around Ephesus by Turkish tour guides who either cannot or refuse to read the Greek inscriptions throughout the city. Despite variations in Greek dialects, even at the time of Herodotus the Greek of Ephesus was evidence of “the kinship of all Greeks in blood and speech”, and at the time of Paul, as Dr Murphy-O’Connor argues, “any educated Ephesian could have been understood anywhere in the eastern Roman empire”. Yet I have been in tour groups in the city that have been told that obviously Greek inscriptions are Latin, or ancient Turkish or Hittite, or that they are no longer legible, when they are simply and visibly accessible to anyone who has learned nothing more than the basic Greek alphabet. The reference to “the Library of Celsius” mentioned at the outset was made while I stood in front of this stunning building this summer with a group of mainly Irish tourists who had arrived in Ephesus from the resort of Kusadasi. The guide had already been embarrassed as I read and translated the simple inscription he had claimed was unintelligible or beyond deciphering. If this is how Turkey presents its treasures to the world, it will continue to need Austrians and other archaeologists for many decades to come.

 

In this book Dr Murphy-O’Connor has done for Paul’s Ephesus what he has done in the recent past for the apostle’s Corinth – if not more. Yet he recognises that Ephesus retained its importance for the Church and Christianity long after Paul’s death. It is said that John the Divine moved to the city after his exile on Patmos had come to an end and after writing the Book of Revelation. Ephesus may have been the locus for the Fourth Gospel and the three Johannine Epistles, and retained its importance until at least the fourth century, with great councils of the Church meeting in the basilica within sight of the Theatre of where Paul once preached.

 

It is impossible to fully appreciate the Johannine imagery without understanding the cultural and literary context of Ephesus that Dr Murphy-O’Connor provides. For example, Strabo questions the contemporary wisdom that Ephesus and six of its neighbouring cities were founded by women, which provides some of the imagery for John addressing his Revelation to the seven churches of Asia, including Ephesus. Dr Murphy O’Connor connects Ephesus with a city of one of the other six churches, Smyrna (Izmir) and a chapel where Saint John the Theologian was commemorated each May.

 

However it is surprising that he makes no connection between Ignatius of Antioch, who wrote extensively about the divisions, schisms, false teachers and heresies that threatened the church in Ephesus, and the way in which his concerns are phrased, with similar passages about false teachers and the strongly incarnational Christology in the three Johannine Letters, especially I John. While accepting that Johannine tradition needs to be assessed in the light of many of the writings we are presented with, he excuses his limitations, saying “it is inappropriate to extend our inquiry further into the post-Pauline period”.

 

Among the Irish researchers acknowledged in the book is the Johannine scholar Dr Kieran O’Mahony of the Milltown Institute, who also hails from Co Cork. Now that Dr Murphy-O’Connor has done justice to Paul’s Ephesus, perhaps another Irish scholar will do the same for the Johannine Ephesus.

 

back to all articles »