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Where was Philadelphia in Revelation?

The Philadelphia of Revelation is Alaşehir in the province of Manisa in western Turkey, at the foot of Mount Tmolus above the valley of the Cogamis, a tributary of the Hermus; the map point stands in the town. It lay about 44 km east of Sardis and 77 km north-west of Laodicea in a straight line, on the road from Sardis up into Phrygia. It is not the other Philadelphia of the time, Rabbah of the Ammonites, today's Amman, which Ptolemy II renamed after himself and which became a city of the Decapolis; the Bible never calls that city Philadelphia.

Revelation, about AD 95, sends Philadelphia the sixth of the seven letters, which, like the letter to Smyrna, has no rebuke: “behold, I have set before thee an open door, and no man can shut it: for thou hast a little strength, and hast kept my word”. The city, founded in the second century BC by the kings of Pergamum and named after Attalus II Philadelphus, stood at the gateway to the uplands of Phrygia, and some read the open door as that position, others as a door for the gospel. The promise “Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out” is often set against a city so shaken by earthquakes, Strabo says, that most of its people lived out in the countryside.

Early in the second century Ignatius of Antioch passed through under guard and later wrote to the Philadelphians from Troas. In the Middle Ages Philadelphia held out as a Byzantine city in the midst of Turkish Anatolia until 1390, when it fell to the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I. In the centre of Alaşehir stand the massive brick piers of a Byzantine basilica known as the church of St John.

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Scripture: Rev 1:11; Rev 3:7–13

Sources

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