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Where was Pisidian Antioch?

Pisidian Antioch stood on a hill about a kilometre north-east of the town of Yalvaç in the lake district of west-central Turkey, where its ruins can be visited; the map point stands on them. It lay about 153 km north of Perga, from which Paul climbed to it over the Taurus, about 124 km west-north-west of Iconium and about 815 km from Jerusalem, all in a straight line. Strictly it was a city of Phrygia on the border of Pisidia, “Antioch near Pisidia” in Strabo's phrase; it is not the Syrian Antioch on the Orontes, about 500 km away, from which the journey set out.

Paul and Barnabas came here on their first journey: “when they departed from Perga, they came to Antioch in Pisidia, and went into the synagogue on the sabbath day, and sat down.” Invited to speak after the reading of the law and the prophets, Paul gave the first of his sermons that Acts reports in full, telling Israel's story from Egypt to David and on to Jesus. “The next sabbath day came almost the whole city together to hear the word of God”; when the Jews opposed them, Paul and Barnabas said, “lo, we turn to the Gentiles”, and after they were expelled they “shook off the dust of their feet against them, and came unto Iconium.”

Augustus made the city a Roman colony of veterans, Colonia Caesarea, after 25 BC, and excavations have uncovered its temple of Augustus, a colonnaded square named after Tiberius, a monumental gate by which fragments of a Latin copy of Augustus' Res Gestae were found in 1914, an aqueduct and a great basilica of the fourth century. Inscriptions of the city name members of a senatorial family, the Sergii Paulli, and William Ramsay linked them with Sergius Paulus, the proconsul of Cyprus who had just believed; some take this as the reason Paul went on to Antioch, others find the link too slight to bear the weight.

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Scripture: Acts 13:7–12; Acts 13:13–16; Acts 13:44–51; Acts 14:19; Acts 14:21–23; 2 Tim 3:11

Sources

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