Archaeology and the Bible
Acts
| Street called Straight | 33 30 31.15N 36 18 17.73E | The shiny section is the covered bazaar. The street, although straighter than most Middle Eastern streets, is no testimony to Roman surveying skills - presumably it was straighter in antiquity. |
| Troas | 39 45 06.71N 26 09 31.51E | Despite the fact that some idiot has stuck a picture of the wooden horse of Troy here, Alexandria Troas is nothing to do with Troy. There are very few ancient remains visible but you can make out the circle of the amphitheatre and the circuit of the walls, indicating that this was once a substantial city. |
| Assos | 39 29 11.17N 26 20 24.76E | The harbour is where St Paul rejoined his ship, though he may well have visited the city which stands on an impressive tel at the top of a very steep hill. |
| St Paul's Bay | 35 57 26.53N 14 23 59.68E | The traditional bay where St Paul's ship was wrecked. |
| Three Fountains | 45 31 55.17N 12 54 48.81E | According to the Antonine Itinerary, Three Taverns was 33 miles from Rome, with Appii forum another ten miles further. The coordinates are on the Appian Way and exactly 33 modern miles from the Forum in Rome. There are no ancient remains to be seen. |
The Early Chapters
There is little on which archaeology can throw light before the conversion of St Paul. Acts 3 refers to the "Beautiful Gate" and indicates that it led into the inner courts of the temple. Although there is no agreement over exactly which gate was intended, most interpreters favour the Nicanor Gate, a 60' wide gateway whose leaves were either made or or covered with the fabuously expensive Corinthian bronze, which was more precious than gold.
No one is exactly certain what was meant by "Corinthian bronze". According to Rabbinic tradition, the Nicanor Gates were yellowish in colour, which has led to the suggestion that Corinthian bronze was an alloy of copper, tin, gold and silver. The alloy consisted of 15% by weight of gold and 5% by weight of silver. When cooled, the bronze had a black scale of cupric oxide on the surface. The finished object was then repeatedly coated with iron sulphate mixed with salt and vinegar and heated. The iron sulphate oxidised (rusted), which removed copper from the surface and also leached out the silver, leaving a matt, gold-rich outer layer. This was then burnished to produce a smooth, shiny, yellow surface. Because the object consisted of 15% gold by weight and because of the work involved in this "depletion gilding", Corinthian bronze was much more expensive than ordinary bronze gilded.
However other descriptions of Corinthian bronze refer to its colour as black. Modern research has shown that the production of such bronze depended on traces of arsenic in the water in which the hot bronze was quenched, and such water was found in the Peirene Fountain in Corinth. Tubs in which the coppersmiths could quench their heated bronze have been found around the Peirene Fountain.
New Scientist Jan 22 1994Damascus
When Saul went to Damascus and encountered Christ along the way, he was taken to Straight Street. There is a street known by that name in Damascus. The modern street is not entirely straight, but the original Roman street may well have been as straight as a ruler, for Roman city plans called for such rigid design. The main street in Jerash, for example, is absolutely straight from the oval forum to the other side of the city.
It is not likely that the so-called "House of Judas" is genuine, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility. Damascus has not been destroyed repeatedly like other cities, so it is possible that a traditional identification may have survived the centuries. Of course, like the famous grandfather's axe, which was the same axe despite having two new heads and three new handles, the house has probably been repaired and renovated and even rebuilt more than once since the days of St Paul.
The Bible records that when Ananias laid his hands on the blind Saul, "immediately there fell from his eyes something like scales", which leads to the suspicion that the intense light which shone around Saul had affected the lenses of his eyes, causing them to cloud over and thus leading to blindness similar to that caused by cataracts. Just as a modern surgeon removes the cloudy lenses, so the affected lenses dropped from Saul's eyes, leaving him able to see light and dark and to recognise shapes and even faces if they were close enough, but unable to focus on fine detail. Today a pair of thick lenses would cure the apostle's "thorn in the flesh".
Needless to say, the spot pointed out to tourists and pilgrims as the very spot where Paul was lowered from the wall, has not a shred of evidence to support it, the more so as the walls of Damascus have been rebuilt since Roman times. Equally dubious is the small shrine some distance outside Damascus which marks the very spot where Paul was converted!
Cornelius
One of the determining events of the early church was the conversion of Cornelius, a centurion of the "Italian Band", probably the Cohors II Italica Civium Romanorum. We know that this cohort was stationed in Syria in AD 157 under the legate Arridius Cornelianus, but the book of Acts places its presence in Palestine 120 years earlier. Made up of Roman citizens from Italy, the cohort may have been part of the governor's personal guard.
As an individual, Cornelius was a welcome but not noteworthy addition to the church. The significance of his conversion lay in the fact that he was a "believer" but not a full-blown proselyte. As an uncircumcised gentile he would normally have been avoided by a pious Jew like St Peter, but as a result of a vision of unclean animals, St Peter understood that he was no longer to call fellow human beings "unclean", an interpretation which was confirmed when Cornelius and members of his household began to speak in tongues.
Some have interpreted this as so-called glossalalia (or as I would call it, gibberish) but St Peter's remark that it was the same gift as the disciples themselves had received at Pentecost means that Cornelius and the members of his family spoke a known tongue. The reason is simple: immigrants to Britain commonly have the man of the family and any school-age children speaking English but the wife and pre-school children continuing to speak only their native language. Almost certainly Cornelius spoke enough Aramaic to converse with St Peter, but equally certainly his wife and family members only spoke their native Latin and St Peter's discourse was conveyed to them in muttered translation. Now they were able to speak and understand Aramaic, praising God in that language - to the astonishment of St Peter's companions - and were able to understand the apostle's preaching.
Antioch
Known as "Antioch on the Orontes" to distinguish it from several other Antiochs (such as Antioch in Pisidia, for example) the city where Jesus' followers were first called "Christians" was founded by Seleucus I, one of the generals of Alexander the Great. Under the Seleucids, Antioch became the capital of Syria.
Over time three separate walled suburbs were built and together the four became known as "Tetrapolis", making up a settled area about 4 miles in diameter. In between the houses were many gardens watered from the Orontes, giving the place a lush appearance unlike any other ancient city. The population grew from an original 17,000 - made up of local people, retired Macedonian soldiers and Jews, but excluding slaves - to half a million in Roman times. By the time Christianity began to be preached Antioch was the third largest city in the Roman world, exceeded only by Rome itself and Alexandria.
However by then the city was chiefly famous for its leisure activities - a bit like Las Vegas in America. Four miles to the west, between Antioch and its harbour, lay a sumptuous park known as the Gardens of Daphne. Built around a temple of Apollo, the gardens were famous for the carnal pleasures available to visitors, causing the satirist Juvenal to remark that "for years now Syrian Orontes has poured its sewage into our native Tiber, its slang and its manners, its flutes, its outlandish harps with their transverse strings, its native tambourines, and the whores who hang out round the race-course" , thus blaming Antioch for the corruption he perceived in Roman morals.
Unfortunately the area was subject to earthquakes and several times Antioch was severely damaged. An earthquake in AD 37 caused Caligula to suspend his cruelties and send out two senators to report on the state of the city. No doubt the Jewish population regarded these as judgements from God and the terror the AD 37 earthquake induced may have contributed to the growth of the Christian church in Antioch. It is entirely in keeping that the slang-loving Antiochenes should have dubbed the new sect "Christians" or "Messiah-ists" as we would put it.
Archaeological work has been conducted in Antioch since 1932 by teams of French and American archaeologists. The only visible remains are the impressive walls on the east of the modern city; most of the rest of Roman Antioch is buried either beneath the modern buildings or silt from the Orontes River. There are, however, a couple of aqueducts and a cave church said to be associated with St Peter.
The major find of the archaeologists is a series of mosaics uncovered mainly in the area where Daphne was believed to be. These are now housed in the Antioch Museum. Regrettably that institution appears disinclined to protect the Roman remains that are being discovered as the modern city expands and allows them to be bulldozed without protest.
St Paul's Journeys
Most of the book of Acts is taken up with St Paul's journeys through Asia Minor and Greece. The various cities mentioned by name all exist - Lystra, Derbe, Iconium, Troas, Assos, and so on. I will simply refer to the few which cast light on the Biblical narrative.
Troas is on the west coast of Turkey and very little remains to attract the tourist. There isn't even, so far as I know, a church to commemorate the raising of Eutychus, the unfortunate youngster who fell asleep during Paul's late-night sermon. However it is possible to drive from there to Assos, a distance I was surprised to discover of 40 miles!
According to the Biblical account, the Christians of Troas met in the evening "on the first day of the week". On the assumption that Luke was using the Jewish method of reckoning and counted the day as beginning in the evening, the New English Bible and the Good News Bible both render the expression as "on the Saturday night". The narrative further states that Paul intended to leave Troas on the morrow - presumably in the daylight hours following his sermon. On the other hand, if St Luke was using Greek or Roman time, the meeting would have taken place on Sunday evening.
Some have claimed that this passage provides evidence that the early Christians met for worship on Sunday. All I can say is that St Paul, born and bred a Pharisee, was certainly not keeping Sunday as a sabbath if he intended to walk forty miles of difficult country on that day!
In actual fact, the unusual circumstances of Paul's impending departure mean that we cannot deduce anything about Christian customs from this passage. The meeting, whether on Saturday night or Sunday night, was clearly a special one called in honour of the departing apostle and was as unusual as Paul's later meeting with the elders of Ephesus - and more than likely his sermon, which Eutychus found so boring, covered much the same ground of warning and farewell as his speech to the elders.
The drive from Troas to Assos is an interesting one and though I doubt that it follows the Roman road (if there was a Roman road) it gives wide views taking in the area through which Paul walked. At first the road follows the plain but then it climbs into hills that even today are wild and desolate and may well have been thickly forested in Paul's day. Along the way there are occasional springs, there are also stone circles with thatched roofs which are the huts for shepherds. Finally we come to a hill crowned with buildings, most of them ancient ruins, the acropolis of Assos. The port, which was Paul's destination, is at the foot of an extremely steep slope and Paul must have scanned the harbour anxiously as he came over the crest to see whether his ship was still in port.
Philippi
The ruins of Philippi do not do justice to what was an important city in Roman times. Visitors to the site enter via a gate close to the theatre, which is their first stop and is commonly infested by hymn-singing bands of pilgrims getting in the way of people who want to take photographs. From there the route takes you past one of three churches discovered on the site and then to an entirely suprious "Prison of St Paul", which is nothing more than a crumbling room for which no purpose has been found - a description that could apply to just about any other room in Philippi.
Visitors then cross the main road and enter a larger area of ruins which include the forum and a stretch of Roman road that was part of the Via Egnatia, which ran across Greece from Dyrrachium (now Durres) to Byzantium. The road was constructed by Gnaeus Egnatius, proconsul of Macedonia. The ruins also include a large bishop's house with a font for baptism and an underground martyrion, a large and much-ruined church, and - the delight of the tourists - a large public toilet.
The only place really associated with St Paul is outside the ruins and a couple of hundred yards up the road to a neat Greek Orthodox church that commemorates the baptism of Lydia, the seller of purple. Nearby is a small stream believed to be the "river" on whose banks the God-fearers of Philippi were in the habit of meeting. A set of concrete steps and platforms can be used by pilgrims who wish to be baptised in the very same river.
Thessalonica
Various Roman period remains have been uncovered in Thessalonica (Thessaloniki), among them a remarkable confirmation of St Luke's scrupulous accuracy. In the introduction to his gospel, Luke boasts that he has taken considerable care in finding out the facts concerning the life of Jesus, which has naturally provoked non-believers to attempt to discredit him. An example of these attacks is Luke's description of the people in charge of the city. In Acts 17:8 English translations use a term such as "rulers of the city" or "city authorities", but Luke uses the word politarches, a compound word not found anywhere else in Greek literature.
Naturally those who wished to attack Luke had considerable fun claiming that he made up the word and should have used some more common word for city authorities. An inscription on the Vardar Gate, discovered in the 19th century, refers to the city authorities in Thessalonica as poleitarchounton, a plural form of the word Luke uses. Of course, this fact does not prove that every statement made by Luke is correct, but it is an indication that we need pretty solid evidence if we are going to maintain that he is wrong on any particular point. The attitude that everything in the Bible is wrong until proved right is simply far too cavalier to be acceptable.
Gallio
One of the more dramatic incidents in the Book of Acts is when a new governor arrives in Corinth and the local Jews, hoping to take advantage of his inexperience and his ignorance of local affairs, promptly riot and drag Paul before him at the bema or judgement seat. The rostrum or podium on which the governor had his seat and from where he could hear law suits or address the populace is still to be seen in the agora at Corinth.
It would seem that Gallio had encountered Jews before, because he gave them a fairly robust answer: "If it were a matter of criminal law or public morality, O Jews, it would be reasonable for me to give you a hearing, but as it is a matter of words and names and your religious law, you deal with it because I want nothing to do with it."
He signalled to his lictors and they drove the Jews away to make way for the next case in Gallio's doubtless busy day. Seeing the attitude of the governor, the bystanders seized the opportunity to give the chief Jew a beating and neither Gallio nor his officials interfered. After that the Jews seem to have left Paul alone!
Junius Annaeus Gallio was born Lucius Annaeus Novatus, the son of Seneca the elder and the older brother of Seneca the Younger. He was born at Cordoba in Spain about the beginning of the Christian era and while still a young man was adopted by Lucius Junius Gallio, a noted rhetorician, and from him took the names Junius Gallio. In some way Junius and Seneca the Younger fell foul of the authorities and were banished to Corsica.
Their fortunes turned when Agrippina chose Seneca to be the tutor for her son Nero and Gallio was given the post of proconsul of the newly created province of Achaea. An inscription found at Delphi allows us to date Gallio's tenure of office for it records an edict of the Caesar Claudius which mentions Gallio as proconsul. The edict is dated to AD 52 (though we cannot be certain whether it refers to the year 51/52 or 52/53) and as Gallio was only in office for a single year - the usual proconsular term - that means that Paul must have been in Corinth in AD 52.
Gallio was a victim of Nero; in AD 65 Seneca was implicated - probably falsely - in a plot to kill Nero and was ordered to commit suicide, which he did rather inefficiently and messily. Gallio died at the same time but it is uncertain whether he was executed by Nero or ordered to commit suicide, or simply chose to do so because of the fate of his brother.
Ephesus
From Corinth St Paul moved to Ephesus, where he stayed briefly before returning to Jerusalem in fulfilment of a vow. However he subsequently returned to Ephesus and this time stayed there for two years, enjoying such success that the local idol-makers rioted in protest against their loss of trade. For two hours the mob sat in the theatre chanting "Great is Diana of the Ephesians" before they could be quietened down by the town clerk who warned them that news of the affair would likely result in an enquiry by the Roman authorities.
The ruins of Ephesus are one of the great attractions of Turkey, not only because of their excellent state of preservation, but more importantly, because they are close to the sea and therefore accessible to cruise ships. If one of our tours coincides with the arrival of a ship at the nearby port, the ruins are positively crowded with sun-burned plebs who know nothing about the place and rather wish they had stayed on board in the air-conditioned bar.
The only building which can be explicitly associated with St Paul is the theatre, which could hold 25,000 spectators and which is set in the slope of Mt Pion at the head of the Arkadiene, the main street of Ephesus. The theatre overlooks the main agora or market place and is just round the corner from the Prytaneion or town hall of Ephesus. The commotion would have been heard all over the city and was guaranteed to alarm Roman nerves.
Barely half a century before Paul's visit, Ephesus had been involved in the Mithridatic War, when Mithridates the Great of Pontus made a spirited attempt to drive the Romans out of Asia Minor. The war started off with coordinated massacres of Romans all over Asia Minor in which 80,000 Roman citizens perished. The city was reconquered by Sulla, who imposed a huge fine and five years of unpaid taxes! The news of unreset in Ephesus, whatever its cause, was certain to make the Roman authorities sit up and take notice.
The only other building of note from this period in Ephesus is one that St Paul is unlikely to have visited - though I would like to think that he did - and that is the great Temple of Artemis (or Diana of the Ephesians, to give the Latin name for the goddess. The temple was 450' long and 225' wide and its 127 columns stood 60' high. It was so rich in carvings and decoration that it was known as one of the seven Wonders of the World. The fanciful Acts of John, an apocryphal book of the second century AD, claims that half the temple fell down when John prayed in it, but in fact a Roman edict of AD 162 confirms the importance of the temple and the cult of Artemis by extending the principal festival to cover a whole month!
The temple was burned by the Goths in AD 268, though enough remained to be officially closed in AD 391 by decree of the emperor Theodosius I. Ten years later a mob of fanatical Christians demolished the building and its stones were used in other buildings - including in Justinian's great Hagha Sophia in Constantinople.
The temple was built on a marsh flooded by the River Caister - Pausanius claims that this was to protect against earthquakes, but archaeologists have found evidence of previous temples which doubtless made the spot holy - and the site was soon buried under twenty feet of silt. Early explorers of Ephesus entirely failed to identify it, as it is some distance outside the city walls, and it was British architect John Turtle Wood who discovered an inscription in the theatre which mentioned that statues of Artemis were carried in procession through the Magnesian Gate. This gate had been found and identified, so Wood reasoned that there must be a paved road leading from the gate to the temple.
In 1867 he began work at the Magnesian Gate and quickly found a paved road, but it took two years of unremitting toil to clear ever deeper deposits of silt away and follow the road to the site of the temple. When found, however, the result was disappointing, as most of the stone of the temple had been carried away over the years for use in other buildings. A few column bases and fragments of relief were all he found to send back to the British Museum in return for its sponsorship of his excavations.
Today the site of the temple has been completely cleared and a single column, made up of unrelated drums, is all that can be seen. Visitors are usually astonished to find that the temple is set in a deep, rectangular pit and fail to realise that the temple stood on open ground, but silt has raised the level of the ground and buried the remains of the temple.
Paul on Trial
The final chapters of Acts consist of Paul's defences of himself before the Roman authorities and a list of ports through which he passed on his way from Greece to Jerusalem and then from Palestine to Rome. There is little that archaeology can add to this account other than confirmation of some of its details.
Felix, the first Roman governor before whom Paul appeared, was procurator of Judea from AD 52-58. He was a younger brother of Pallas, the influential freedman in the time of Claudius and was himself a freedman, probably of Claudius' mother, Antonia Minor. He was cruel and licentious and enriched himself by accepting bribes, which confirms the statement in Acts 24:26 that he kept Paul in prison in hope of a bribe to free him.
Luke mentions that the first hearing was before Felix and his wife Drusilla, who was a Jewess. She was, in fact, the daughter of Herod Agrippa I and his cousin/wife Cypros, whom Felix had married only a short time before, having divorced his first wife (also Drusilla) shortly after the death of Claudius who had arranged the marriage! They must have been happy together, for the marriage lasted for a further twenty-three years and ended only when Drusilla and her son, Marcus Antonius Agrippa, decided to take a short break in Pompeii. Both perished in the eruption of AD 79.
St Paul was in prison for two years before Felix was followed by Porcius Festus, which enables us to date his arrest to AD 56. When Felix returned to Rome he was charged with having massacred Jews and Syrians in Caesarea in order to plunder their belongings (he was successful in escaping the charge thanks to the intervention of his older brother) and it may have been concern over this that led him to leave Paul in prison when he left "because Felix wanted to grant a favour to the Jews" (Acts 24:27).
Very little is known about the new governor apart from what Josephus records, but coins minted in Judea and dated to Nero's fifth year confirm that he was in power by AD 59. Early in his period of office he was urged to retry Paul and, being inexperienced in Jewish wiles, was persuaded to offer Paul the chance of a full trial in Jerusalem. Knowing that the Jews of Jerusalem were determined to murder him at whatever cost to themselves, Paul exercised his right as a Roman citizen to appeal to Caesar. Festus was doubtless glad to wash his hands of the troublesome affair and duly dispatched him to Rome.
While waiting for a suitable ship, however, the local Jewish king Agrippa II came on a visit with his sister, Berenice. She had been married three times before: to Marcus Julius Alexander, the son of a Jewish notable in Alexandria, who died just over a year later; to her father's brother, Herod of Chalcis, with whom she had two sons but who also died after just four years of marriage; and to Polemon II of Pontus. It is claimed that this was only a marriage of convenience on her part, to dispel rumours that she was engaging in incest with her brother, but Polemon appears to have been genuinely in love with her, for at her insistence he converted to Judaism and underwent circumcision. Nevertheless Berenice soon left him and returned to live with her brother.
It is possible, therefore, that at the time of the hearing, Agrippa was in an illicit relationship with Berenice. It is interesting that in his sermon St Paul saw no need to rebuke the guilty pair. Either he disbelieved the rumour or he rightly recognised that their greatest need was not a moral life, but acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah, for that would inevitably result in a moral life. His preaching certainly had no effect, for Berenice went on to become the long-term mistress of Titus, the conqueror of Jerusalem and it was only her unpopularity with the upper class in Rome that prevented her from becoming his wife when he became caesar.
The Voyage to Rome
Paul's ill-fated journey to Rome started at Caesarea. There is a comprehensive nautical analysis of the details of this voyage on the Diggings website. The strong north-east wind, called Euroclydon, is known to modern sailors as a Levanter, though to the natives of the Adriatic it is the bura or bora. I have twice been in Croatia when the bura struck and can testify to the sudden drop in temperature and the strength of the wind. The second time I had a video camera with me and was able to make a short film which is worth watching if you want some idea of the terror experienced by Paul and his companions.
Although the location of the eventual shipwreck is identified by tradition as St Paul's Bay on the north-eastern coast of Malta, there is no archaeological evidence to confirm or deny this. However we have found numerous ancient anchors which, unlike modern metal ones, were simply blocks of stone with a hole drilled in one end through which the anchor rope could be threaded. They held - or failed to hold - by weight alone instead of by digging into the sea floor as modern anchors do.
Rome
The book of Acts ends with St Paul staying in a private house in Rome. Modern pilgrims are shown the Mamertine Prison, an underground chamber said to have been constructed around 630 BC by Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of Rome. Its first purpose was a cistern but it was soon used as a prison and, because of its secure underground location, it was usually reserved for notable prisoners who were under sentence of death. Among those incarcerated in the Mamertine were Jugurtha, the Numidian king, who was starved to death in here, the Catline conspirators and the Gallic war leader Vercingetorix, who survived five years here before his execution in 46 BC.
Although tradition claims that both St Paul and St Peter were imprisoned here before their executions, there is no independent evidence that either was regarded as of sufficient importance to merit a place in the Mamertine.
The supposed tombs of SS Paul and Peter - at St Paul's without the Walls and St Peter's respectively - are equally dependent upon tradition. Excavations in both places have revealed sarcophagii and possible funerary shrines but there is no real archaeological evidence. The fact that there are graffiti invoking the names of the two great apostles simply proves that the tradition of their burial in those places goes back a long way.
The main objection, to my mind, is the likelihood of the young and persecuted Christian community have the funds or obtaining the permission to provide executed criminals with stone sarcophagii, which even in those days were not cheap! At best we can imagine the Christians being given the bodies and burying them in haste and in secret and then preserving the memory of the place of the burial. As such, although the location might be correct, the chances of finding any remains of the apostles is vanishingly small.
Nicanor Gate The inscribed ossuary of Nicanor, who came from Alexandria, has been found in Jerusalem. Return
inscription found at DelphiThe Gallio Inscription can be seen in the museum at Delphi and if you come on a Digging Up the Past tour we will certainly show it to you. If you are on your own or with another tour company, most guides ignore it - they will prattle endlessly about the Charioteer and the various treasures on display (and probably work in a dig about the Elgin Marbles) but they appear not even to know about this important inscription! As you leave the museum you go down a ramp to a cool portico where there are toilets. On your left as you descend the ramp there are several inscriptions set into the wall and the Gallio Inscription is one of them. Return
25,000 spectators That does not mean that all 25,000 seats were filled during the riot! By AD 100 the population of Ephesus was estimated at 450,000 (making it the second largest city in the Roman empire), but those taking part in the riot were, most probably, Demetrius the silversmith and the members of his guild, plus any unemployed loiterers looking for trouble. Still, even two or three thousand in the theatre, with the slopes of Mt Pion behind to act as a sounding board, would have made enough noise to cause alarm throughout the city. Return
Seven Wonders Antipater of Sidon, the author of the list of Seven Wonders, names them thus in a poem of 140 BC:
I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, "Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on anything so grand".
Berenice soon left him In retaliation Polemon II abandoned Judaism. According to later legend, Bartholomew the Apostle visited Pontus and cured Polemon's daughter, who was demon possessed. As a result Polemon became a Christian but this too did not last and he appears to have ended his life an unrepentant pagan. Return
