History Globe
town or village
Lystra
- Today Mound of Lystra, by Hatunsaray
History
Lystra lay in Lycaonia, some 30 km south-south-west of Iconium (Konya), on a mound north of the village of Hatunsaray. Its site was long uncertain. The geographer William Leake guessed it in the early nineteenth century, and in the 1880s the American J. R. S. Sterrett found here a Latin inscription, and bought a coin, showing that Lystra had been a Roman colony; with that, the place was fixed.
Augustus made Lystra a colony, Colonia Iulia Felix Gemina Lustra, one of several veteran colonies in the hills of southern Galatia meant to hold the mountain peoples of Pisidia and Isauria in check. Its coins, from Augustus to the empress Faustina the Younger, show Minerva and the founder ploughing the boundary of the new city. Pliny lists the Lystreni among the peoples of Galatia.
Fleeing from Iconium, Paul and Barnabas preached at Lystra. Paul healed a man who had been lame from birth, and the crowd cried out in the speech of Lycaonia, "The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men." They called Barnabas Jupiter and Paul Mercurius, and the priest of Jupiter, whose temple stood before the city, brought oxen and garlands to sacrifice; the apostles tore their clothes and pointed them to the living God who made heaven and earth. Then Jews from Antioch and Iconium won the people over, and Paul was stoned and dragged out of the city for dead. He rose and went back in, and the next day left for Derbe; on the way back he strengthened the disciples here.
On his next journey Paul found at Lystra the disciple Timothy, son of a believing Jewish mother and a Greek father, who was well spoken of by the brethren at Lystra and Iconium, and took him along. The Second Letter to Timothy names his grandmother Lois and mother Eunice and recalls Paul's sufferings at Lystra. The town itself remained small, and as late as 1907 William Ramsay wrote that excavation at Lystra was urgently needed.
Scripture: Acts 14:6–10; Acts 14:11–15; Acts 14:19–22; Acts 16:1–3; 2 Tim 1:5; 2 Tim 3:11
Sources
- Inscriptions of Colonia Lystra: CIL III 6786; J. R. S. Sterrett, The Wolfe Expedition to Asia Minor (1888), no. 352
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 5.147
- B. V. Head, Historia Numorum (2nd ed., 1911), Lycaonia: Lystra (colonial coins, Augustus to Faustina II)
- W. M. Ramsay, The Cities of St. Paul (1907), part VI: Lystra
- B. Levick, Roman Colonies in Southern Asia Minor (1967)
Checked against its sources; not yet read by a historian.
Verses (6)
- Acts 14:6
- They were ware of it, and fled unto Lystra and Derbe, cities of Lycaonia, and unto the region that lieth round about:
- Acts 14:8
- And there sat a certain man at Lystra, impotent in his feet, being a cripple from his mother’s womb, who never had walked:
- Acts 14:21
- And when they had preached the gospel to that city, and had taught many, they returned again to Lystra, and to Iconium, and Antioch,
- Acts 16:1
- Then came he to Derbe and Lystra: and, behold, a certain disciple was there, named Timotheus, the son of a certain woman, which was a Jewess, and believed; but his father was a Greek:
- Acts 16:2
- Which was well reported of by the brethren that were at Lystra and Iconium.
- 2 Tim 3:11
- Persecutions, afflictions, which came unto me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra; what persecutions I endured: but out of them all the Lord delivered me.
King James Version