EPHESUS ĕf’ ə səs (̓́Εφεσος, G2387, possible meaning, desirable). The city of Ephesus lay at the mouth of the Cayster, between the Koressos Range and the sea, on the western coast of Asia Minor. Like all the river valleys around the great blunt end of the Asian continent’s westward protrusion, that of the Cayster was a highway into the interior, the terminal of a trade route that linked with other roads converging and branching out toward the separated civilizations of the E and the Asian steppes. This was why Ephesus was chosen by the early Ionian colonists from Athens as a site for their colony. The Greeks called a colony an “emporion,” or a “way in,” because their concept of such settlement was that of a gateway by which an active self-governing community could tap the trade and resources of a foreign hinterland. Ephesus filled the role precisely.

By NT times, however, the great days of Ephesus’ trade were long past. Like her rival Miletus, similarly located at the end of the Maeander Valley thirty m. to the S, Ephesus had difficulty with her harbor, the essential gateway to the sea. Deforestation was mankind’s ancient folly, and no part of the Mediterranean world suffered worse than Asia Minor. The quest for timber and charcoal, the result of overgrazing, and the destructiveness of the Mediterranean goat, eternally nibbling and trampling the regenerating forest, denuded the hinterland. Topsoil slipped from the bare hillsides reft of their cover, streams became swamps, and the storm waters reached the sea laden with silt that choked the harbors. The harbor works of Ephesus may be traced today seven m. from the sea. Where once a sheltered gulf and waterway formed a safe haven for ships, there is now a reedy plain. Sir William Ramsay, most factual of archeologists, speaks in awe of the “uncanny volume of sound” which, in his day at the turn of the cent., greeted the evening visitor to the desolate levels where Ephesus once harbored her ships.

She was, none the less, over many centuries, fortunate in her engineers. The winding Maeander was silting up the harbor of Miletus as early as 500 b.c., and when that city suffered irreparable damage in the Pers. suppression of the great revolt of the Ionian Gr. cities, the choking up of her waterway passed beyond repair. It was Ephesus’ opportunity, and a succession of rulers promoted the maintenance of the harbor facilities that the increased volume of trade and traffic demanded. The kings of Pergamum, most dynamic and powerful of the lesser successor states of Alexander’s divided empire, did much for Ephesus, and when the Romans inherited the kingdom of Pergamum by the will of its last ruler, Attalus III, they continued the policy of promoting Ephesian trade. The Romans assumed the legacy of Pergamum in 133 b.c. and used Ephesus as the proconsul’s seat. The city was proud of its name, “the Landing Place,” and the title is found on a coin as late as the 3rd cent. of the Christian era. It is, perhaps, not without significance that the same coin bears the image of a small oar-propelled boat, an official’s “barge,” not the deep-hulled merchantmen that mark the city’s pride in her sea-borne trade on the coins of earlier centuries. Paul’s ship made no call there in a.d. 57. Domitian, at the end of the 1st cent., appears to have been the last ruler to attempt to repair the harbor of Ephesus, but trade had obviously declined two centuries before. By the time of Justinian, five centuries later, the battle with sand, silt, and mud was lost, and Ephesus was falling to ruins in a swampy terrain. Justinian, to be sure, built a church to Saint John on the site, in part compensation perhaps for the looting of the columns from the temple of Artemis for St. Sophia in Byzantium, where they may still be seen in the vast basilica. It is significant that the church of Saint John gave its name to the place. The Apo stle John was called in Gr. “Hagios Theologos”—“The Holy Theologian.” This was corrupted into Ayasoluk, the modern Turkish name for the village that stands near the site of ancient Ephesus.

Deepening economic depression and decline must have been a feature of Ephesus’ life over the last cent. b.c. The city turned, as any anxious community might in such circumstances, to the equivalent of her tourist trade. Multitudes came to visit the temple of Artemis, a cult that requires explanation.

When the son of Codrus, last king of Athens, founded the city, he placed his colonists near the shrine of an ancient Anatolian goddess whom the Greeks, following the religious syncretism common in the ancient world, called after their own goddess Artemis. This was perhaps in the 10th, 11th, or 12th cent. b.c., so uncertain are dates in this borderland of legend and history. The cult thus recognized was that of a nature-goddess, associated with carnal fertility rituals, orgiastic rites, and religious prostitution. The peculiar feature in the case of Ephesus was that the cult was associated with a meteoric stone, the “image which fell down from Jupiter” of the guild-master’s clever speech reported by Luke (Acts 19 ASV). Lost somewhere among the ruins, or concealed in the surrounding countryside by its last devotees, the cult-object possibly still exists. Charles Seltman, with some plausibility, suggests that it is actually a strange stone object, at present in the Liverpool City Museum (Riot in Ephesus, pp. 86, 87). Other elements over the course of centuries intruded into the worship, and the final form of the cult-image of Artemis of Ephesus was a strangely ornamented female figure, shrine and basket on head, a veil decorated with beasts, long necklaces, embroidered sleeves, legs sheathed with empaneled animals, and with multiple breasts, or, as some suggest, an apron covered with clusters of grapes or dates, sign and symbol of Artemis’ role as the nourishing spirit of nature.

It was Croesus of neighboring Lydia (he reigned from 564 to 546 b.c.) who promoted the construction of the first temple to Artemis. Fragments of the columns that he donated, inscribed with his name, are in the British Museum. At the time, Croesus’ temple was the largest of Gr. temples, and perhaps was some consolation for the loss of her independence, for it was Croesus who made Ephesus subject to Sardis. She was never, in fact, independent again. This temple, first sign of the international importance of the Artemis cult of Ephesus, stood right through the Pers. imperial dominance of the Aegean coast of Asia Minor. It was maliciously burned in 356 b.c. on the very night, the makers of omens later noted, that Alexander the Great was born of Olympias in distant Macedon.

Alexander, into whose control Ephesus passed in 334 b.c. at the beginning of his mighty “drive to the East,” contributed largely to the new temple, which was destined to be a shrine of unrivaled splendor and to rank as one of the wonders of the world. It endured until the Goths sacked Ephesus in a.d. 263. The ruins have been identified in a marsh, one and a half miles NE of the city, after the discovery of Ephesus’ main boulevard in 1870. It is said that the building was four times the size of Athens’ magnificent Parthenon. Pheidias, Praxiteles, and Apelles all adorned it. It was widely depicted on coins. The general impression left with the archeologist and historian, who peer into the crowded past of the great city, is that the guild-master was not unjustified in his claim that “all Asia and the world” (Acts 19:27) reverenced the Ephesian Artemis. As the guild master by implication admitted, the temple was the core of Ephesus’ commercial prosperity. Around the great shrine, to which worshipers and tourists poured from far and near, tradesmen and hucksters found a living, supplying visitors with food and lodging, dedicatory offerings, and the silver souvenir models of the shrine that the guild of Demetrius was most interested in making and selling. The temple was also a treasury and bank, in which private individuals, kings, and cities made deposits. Xenophon, the Athenian, described such a deposit with the “sacristan of Artemis,” together with a testamentary deposition regarding the disposal of the money in the event of his not surviving the campaign ahead of him. Paul was, in fact, assaulting a stronghold of pagan religion, together with the active life and commerce associated with a vast heathen cult, in a key city of the central Mediterranean and a focal point of communication. Ephesus was also a seat of proconsular power from which the whole province of Asia could be influence d. Churches arose significantly during his stay in the three cities of the Lycus Valley—Laodicea, Colossae, and Hierapolis—in spite of the fact that Paul did not visit these centers. Radiation along the lines of communication from a point of active life accounted for such foundations. All the seven churches mentioned in the apocalyptic letters (Rev 2 and 3) were no doubt established during the same period of apostolic ministry. “A wide door for effective work has opened to me,” wrote Paul, “and there are many adversaries” (1 Cor 16:9).

The preaching of Christianity in the school of Tyrannus was hitting the Artemis cult hard, so hard that the turnover in dependent trades was visibly showing the adverse effects. A riot ensued, so vividly and ironically described in Acts 19. The story is a strong, clear light on the manner in which the new faith was cutting across established forms and patterns of pagan life in the 1st cent. So it came about that Paul “fought with beasts at Ephesus” (1 Cor 15:32). He caught up a phrase of Plato from his student days in Tarsus. Plato likened the mob to wild animals. It was a dangerous situation. A fine street ran through the city from the harbor wharves at the river mouth to the great theater where the level land began to rise toward Mount Pion, a boulevard of some beauty and lined by fine buildings and columned porticoes. It was the main artery of Ephesian life, destined in later years to be even more richly adorned.

Led by the silversmiths, the mob poured down this highway. The text of Beza sometimes supplies a detail that has a ring of authenticity, and his unorthodox text adds a phrase to Acts 19:28 which may, in one flash, give a glimpse of the excited scene. Inflamed by the speech of the rabble-rouser Demetrius, delivered no doubt in the meeting house of the silversmith’s guild, the audience, says Beza’s version, poured “into the street.” It is surely the great central boulevard that is mentioned. The noisy group swept along with them the flotsam of the town, the idlers, the visitors, the mob of any great eastern city, and flowed toward the common place of assembly—the theater on the low hillside. The greater part, says Luke in one ironical phrase, “did not know why they had come together” (19:32). It was a perilous situation, not only for Paul and his little party, but also for the Jews at large, who had every reason to fear a pogrom. The Jews had a large colony at Ephesus, and considerable privileges (Jos., Antiq. XIV. x. 12, 25). They had much to lose; hence the venture of Alexander whom the Jews “put forward,” doubtless to make sure that their community as a whole was not blamed for the revolutionary views of the rabbi from Tarsus. At the sight of Alexander, who had taken some risk by his public appearance, the crowd broke into their chant, a rhythmic din that they kept up for two hours.

It is, as Ramsay says (St. Paul the Traveller and Roman Citizen, p. 277, 278), “the most instructive picture of society in an Asian city at this period that has come down to us....In the speech of Demetrius are concentrated most of the feelings and motives that, from the beginning to the end, made the mob so hostile to the Christians in the great oriental cities.” It required all the political art of the grammateus, no mere “town-clerk,” but the city’s leading official and obviously a most able man, to restore quiet and order. One phrase in his clever speech would appear to date the incident with some precision. If anything illegal had been done to rouse the just resentment of the silversmiths’ guild, he said “there are proconsuls” (Acts 19:38). The historian Tacitus tells how Agrippina, the vicious mother of the Emperor Nero, had Junius Silanus, the proconsul of Asia, poisoned (Tac. Ann. XIII, 1). Silanus was a great-grandson of the Emperor Augustus, and was thus considered a menace to her son, whom Agrippina had thrust forward to the succession by all manner of intrigue and crime. The murder was committed by two men, a Rom. knight and a freedman who held the post of steward of the imperial estates in Asia. If the two villains assumed temporary proconsular power, the pl. of the official’s speech is accounted for; otherwise it is without explanation. This assumption would fix the date of the incident at a.d. 54.

Another phrase in the story is illuminating. Why did the “Asiarchs” seek to protect Paul? (See Asiarchs.) These officials were members of a corporation, built on the model of an earlier Gr. institution, and charged with the maintenance and protection of the Caesar cult (see Emperor Worship) in Asia. It would appear probable that there was a measure of rivalry between those in charge of the newer ritual, a cult that was not yet deeply founded in Ephesus, and the custodians and champions of the vast commercialized worship of Artemis. Perhaps the Asiarchs, not yet aware of all the implications of Christianity, and as yet unhampered by any anti-Christian legislation, were not disturbed by damage to their rivals. Paul’s Rom. citizenship may have weighed a little with the officers of Caesar. Whatever happened, Paul was rescued and, perhaps under some official pressure, withdrew before the irate guildsmen had the opportunity to file a formal indictment. It may also have been a consideration that weighed with Paul—that such an indictment would have had scant chance of a just hearing before such scoundrels as Publius Celer and the freedman Helios, if indeed they held brief authority in the city at the time.

It is possible from the NT to gain some idea of the progress of the Ephesian church. Although there is not the intimate insight into the doings and problems of the Ephesian Christian community, as the Corinthian epistles give, the NT provides a series of glimpses of considerable interest. First, there is the vivid story already examined. Another incident is the apostle’s advice to the elders. He passed along the Asia Minor coast three or four years after the riot in Ephesus. He invited the leaders of the church to meet him at Miletus (had he given some promise to the Asiarchs not to return to Ephesus?). Paul conversed with them, and from the intimacy of almost three years’ experience, warned the little community of tensions to come. That the trouble came is evident from John’s letter to the Ephesian church, most prob. written when Domitian’s persecution was raging.

John’s letter was one of seven addressed to the Asian circuit, and prudently couched in the style of Jewish apocalyptic lit. Ephesus, as was proper, was the first church addressed, and the subject matter is light on the city, and its church, a generation after its founding. Three years of Paul’s teaching in the school of Tyrannus, the nature of which may be partly glimpsed from Paul’s own letter, had laid a firm basis for growth. There was much for which John could commend the Ephesian Christians; their toil, endurance, discernment, and vigor. Their lapse from first ardor and enthusiasm was due, according to Ramsay’s famous thesis, to an infiltration of the Christian minority by the weariness of a civic community that had passed its prime and was living on its fading splendor.

It was natural enough in the religious capital of Asia that the sect of the Nicolaitans should be in evidence. Of this group it is fair to assume that they were Greeks who saw in their own cults a measure of true revelation, a position that might have arguments to commend it, but who carried this belief to the point of advocating unwise compromise with the debased forms of those cults in such prominence around them. Perhaps, too, they saw in the Caesar-cult only a harmless ritual of loyalty, and not an issue of man-worship on which a Christian need stake life and livelihood. Ephesus, taught by two apostles, rejected all accommodation with paganism and those who advocated the softer policy.

The question remaining is this: Was John too rigid, too extreme? Need the church, for instance, for the sake of a pinch of incense, have been exposed to the bitterness of persecution? History gives the answer. Those who accepted John’s rigid rule came through that persecution refined and strengthened. They became the forefathers of all true Christianity. They laid in their suffering the foundations on which all true religion has since built. To compromise would ultimately have set Christ, where Emperor Severus ultimately placed him—in a chapel along with the images of Jupiter, Augustus, and Abraham. “The historian,” writes Sir William Ramsay, “must regard the Nicolaitans with intense interest, and must deeply regret that we know so little about them....At the same time he must feel that nothing could have saved the infant Church from melting away into one of those vague and ineffective schools of philosophic ethics except the stern and strict rule that is laid down here by St. John. An easygoing Christianity could never have survived; it could not have conquered and trained the world; only the most convinced, resolute, almost bigoted adherence to the most uncompromising interpretation of its principles could have given the Christians the courage and self-reliance that were needed. For them to hesitate or to doubt was to be lost” (Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches, 300).

The last glimpse of Ephesus in the NT reveals an aging church in need of an infusion of new life, hence, the closing detail of imagery in the apocalyptic letter (Rev 2:1-7). Coins of Ephesus sometimes show a date palm, sacred to Artemis, and the symbol of the goddess’ beneficent activity. “To him who conquers I will grant,” wrote John, “to eat of the tree of life.” The church, however, did not survive. Ignatius, writing a generation later, still accorded the church high praise. It became a seat of bishops, where a notable council was held as late as a.d. 431. Then came a long decline. The coast, with continual soil erosion of the hinterland, became malarial. The Turks came with ruin for Asia. The church died with the city. The “candlestick” was removed from its place.

Archeology, none the less, has shown that the prestige and magnificence of the city long outlived its declining usefulness as a seaport. Ramsay, broadly correct in his main thesis of Ephesus’ decline dates its disastrous impact too early. Under Claudius in the middle of the 1st cent. and under Trajan at the beginning of the 2nd, the great theater was remodeled. Under Claudius the monumental Marble Street was built. Nero gave Ephesus a stadium. Domitian widened and beautified the great central boulevard. Adorning continued till the days of the Gothic raid in a.d. 263. (See Archeology.) It is obvious that Paul’s vision had picked one of the strategic centers of the world.

Bibliography W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches (1904); A. H. M. Jones, Cities in the Eastern Provinces (1937); E. M. Blaiklock, The Christian in Pagan Society (1951); The Cities of the New Testament (1965).