Paul’s longest stay anywhere, his most painful correspondence, and his greatest letter all belong to these four years. 1 & 2 Corinthians · Romans

Ephesus

Ephesus was a major port and the home of the temple of Artemis, one of the wonders of the ancient world. Paul spends about three years there — longer than anywhere else — teaching daily in a lecture hall, and Luke says all the residents of the province heard the word.

It ends in a riot. A silversmith named Demetrius, who makes his living selling silver shrines of Artemis, works out that this preaching is bad for business, and the city fills a theater with a crowd chanting for two hours. The town clerk finally talks them down by pointing out that they are risking a charge of rioting with no case to bring. It is a reminder that the gospel did not spread in a vacuum — it touched money, and that is where the resistance sharpened.

Acts 19:1–41

1 and 2 Corinthians

1 Corinthians, from Ephesus, about A.D. 55. Corinth was a wealthy, rough port city, and the church there had taken on the character of the town. The letter works through their reports and their questions one by one: factions forming around favorite teachers, a case of immorality nobody would confront, believers suing each other, disorder at the Lord’s Supper, arguments about spiritual gifts. In the middle of the argument about gifts he stops and writes the chapter on love that gets read at weddings — it was written to a congregation that could not get along.

2 Corinthians, from Macedonia, about A.D. 56. The most personal thing he wrote. His authority had been challenged by newcomers who were more impressive in person, and his defense is not a list of achievements but a list of beatings, shipwrecks, sleepless nights and anxieties — and a thorn in the flesh he asked three times to have removed, and did not.

Romans

Written from Corinth, about A.D. 57. Romans is unlike the others in one important way: Paul had never been to Rome, and was not fixing a problem there. He was introducing himself to a church he hoped would support him on to Spain, and so he set out the whole of what he preached in order — the human condition, the righteousness of God given through faith, the place of Israel, and what all of it looks like on a Tuesday in an ordinary life.

Because he was not firefighting, it is the most complete statement of his thinking we have, and it has moved more people than any other letter in the collection. He did reach Rome eventually — in chains, at government expense, which is not what he had in mind.

The road back

Two scenes from the return trip stay with people. At Troas, Paul talks until midnight and a young man named Eutychus falls asleep in a third-storey window and falls out; Luke, a physician, notes he was picked up dead, and then that he was taken home alive. And at Miletus, Paul calls the Ephesian elders to meet him and tells them they will not see his face again. They weep and pray with him on the beach.

He is going up to Jerusalem carrying a collection of money from the Gentile churches for the poor believers there — a practical, unglamorous piece of work he cared about enormously, because it was Gentiles and Jews acting as one family. Along the way people warn him repeatedly not to go.

Acts 20:1–21:14

He goes anyway. That is the next part.