Where was Paul stoned?

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Accepted Answer

Paul was stoned at Lystra, a small Roman colony in Lycaonia, the high plain of central Asia Minor, about 33 km south-west of Iconium (today's Konya) in a straight line; the map point stands on the mound by the village of Hatunsaray in Turkey. Derbe, where he went the next day, was about 95 km further east, and Pisidian Antioch, from which his enemies followed him, about 128 km to the north-west. Paul and Barnabas had fled there from Iconium. When Paul healed a man lame from birth, the crowd “lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, The gods are come down to us in the likeness of men”, took Barnabas for Zeus and Paul for Hermes, and the priest of Zeus brought oxen to sacrifice. Then “there came thither certain Jews from Antioch and Iconium, who persuaded the people, and, having stoned Paul, drew him out of the city, supposing he had been dead. Howbeit, as the disciples stood round about him, he rose up, and came into the city: and the next day he departed with Barnabas to Derbe.” Paul came back to Lystra on the same journey and again on the next, when he took Timothy, a native of the town, as his companion; years later he reminded Timothy of the persecutions “at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra”. Lystra was found in 1885, when the American J. R. S. Sterrett read a Latin inscription on the mound naming the colony Lustra; Augustus had settled veterans there about 25 BC. Inscriptions from the district record priests of Zeus and a statue of Hermes dedicated to Zeus, so Luke's pair of gods matches the local cult, and Ovid's tale of Zeus and Hermes visiting Baucis and Philemon in the guise of men is set in neighbouring Phrygia. Systematic excavation of the mound began only in 2024, by a team from Necmettin Erbakan University in Konya.