Paul’s missionary journeys are the travels the Acts of the Apostles records between his years in Antioch and his arrival in Rome. Acts describes three journeys of preaching, usually dated between about 46 and 57 CE, followed by a fourth voyage, to Rome, made as a prisoner. Together they took him through Cyprus, the cities of Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece. The routes below are those Acts gives. Paul’s own letters, which are older than Acts, add places Acts never mentions and leave out others, and the last section sets the two side by side.
The dates are the usual modern reckoning. Acts gives no years, and the only fixed point on the routes is the proconsul Gallio at Corinth, whose term an inscription at Delphi places around 51 to 52.1 Everything else is counted back and forward from it.
Before the journeys: Damascus, Arabia and Tarsus #
Paul’s first travels after his vision are known only from his own letter to the Galatians, and Acts says nothing of them. He went to Arabia, and then back to Damascus, before any visit to Jerusalem.
17οὐδὲ ἀνῆλθον εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα πρὸς τοὺς πρὸ ἐμοῦ ἀποστόλους, ἀλλὰ ἀπῆλθον εἰς Ἀραβίαν, καὶ πάλιν ὑπέστρεψα εἰς Δαμασκόν. 18Ἔπειτα μετὰ ἔτη τρία ἀνῆλθον εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα ἱστορῆσαι Κηφᾶν, καὶ ἐπέμεινα πρὸς αὐτὸν ἡμέρας δεκαπέντε·
17Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus. 18Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.2
He then went “into the regions of Syria and Cilicia”, the province of his home city, Tarsus. Acts says that Barnabas went to Tarsus to find him and brought him to Antioch, where they taught for a year, and that “the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch”.3 Antioch, in Syria, was the base from which all three journeys set out.
The first missionary journey (Acts 13–14) #
The church at Antioch sent out Barnabas and Saul, with John Mark as their helper. They sailed to Cyprus, the home of Barnabas, crossed it from Salamis to Paphos, and there met the governor Sergius Paulus. From that scene on, Acts calls Saul by his Roman name, Paul, as What does the name Paul mean? explains.
From Cyprus they sailed to Perga, where John Mark left them, and went inland to Antioch in Pisidia, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe, in the Roman province of Galatia. At Lystra, after a healing, the crowd took them for gods: “they called Barnabas, Jupiter; and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker”.4 Soon after, Jews from Antioch and Iconium turned the same crowd against Paul, and he was stoned and left for dead. The two men went back through the same towns, appointed elders, and sailed home to Syrian Antioch.
The journey ended in the dispute it had caused. Men from Judaea taught that Gentile believers had to be circumcised, and Paul and Barnabas went up to Jerusalem over the question. What was decided there, and what Paul made of it, is the subject of The Jerusalem Council.
The second missionary journey (Acts 15:36–18:22) #
Paul proposed a second journey to revisit the churches, and quarrelled with Barnabas over John Mark. “And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other”.5 Barnabas took Mark to Cyprus. Paul took Silas overland through Syria and Cilicia to Derbe and Lystra, where Timothy joined them, and Acts says Paul circumcised him “because of the Jews which were in those quarters”.
From Troas, after a vision of a man of Macedonia, they crossed into Europe. At Philippi a merchant woman, Lydia, received them, and Paul and Silas were beaten and jailed. They moved on to Thessalonica and Berea, each time leaving after trouble in the synagogue, and Paul went on alone to Athens. There Acts gives him a speech on the Areopagus, which begins from an altar inscribed “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD” and ends with only a few converts.
At Corinth Paul stayed “a year and six months”, working as a tentmaker with Aquila and Priscilla, until the Jews of the city brought him before Gallio, who refused to hear the case. Paul sailed by way of Ephesus to Caesarea, went up to greet the church, and returned to Antioch. His first letter to the Thessalonians, the oldest of his letters, was written on this journey.
The third missionary journey and Paul in Ephesus (Acts 18:23–21:17) #
The third journey went back through Galatia and Phrygia to Ephesus, the chief city of the province of Asia, and it was there that Paul stayed longest. Acts gives two years of teaching in the hall of Tyrannus, “so that all they which dwelt in Asia heard the word of the Lord Jesus, both Jews and Greeks”; in Paul’s farewell speech the stay becomes “the space of three years”.6 From Ephesus he wrote to the Corinthians.
The stay ended in a riot. A silversmith named Demetrius, who made shrines of Artemis, warned his trade that Paul’s preaching would ruin them, and the crowd filled the theatre crying for two hours “Great is Diana of the Ephesians”. Paul left for Macedonia and Greece, spent three months there, and turned back through Macedonia when a plot was laid against him.
At Troas, as Paul talked late into the night, a young man named Eutychus fell asleep and dropped from a third-floor window; the scene is examined in Eutychus. At Miletus Paul called the elders of Ephesus to him and told them they would not see his face again. He was carrying the collection from his Gentile churches to Jerusalem, and The purse: the collection for Islamicjerusalem follows that money.
The voyage to Rome #
In Jerusalem Paul was seized in the Temple and taken into Roman custody. He spent two years in prison at Caesarea under the governors Felix and Festus, and then appealed to Caesar, a right that Acts makes depend on his Roman citizenship.7 He was sent to Rome by sea, under guard. The ship was caught by a storm and wrecked on Malta, where the islanders, seeing a viper fasten on his hand and do him no harm, “changed their minds, and said that he was a god”.
Paul in Rome is the last scene Acts gives, and it is not the end of his life.
30Ἐνέμεινεν δὲ διετίαν ὅλην ἐν ἰδίῳ μισθώματι, καὶ ἀπεδέχετο πάντας τοὺς εἰσπορευομένους πρὸς αὐτόν, 31κηρύσσων τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ διδάσκων τὰ περὶ τοῦ κυρίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ μετὰ πάσης παρρησίας ἀκωλύτως.
30And Paul dwelt two whole years in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him, 31Preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him.8
Acts stops there. It does not say whether he was tried, freed or killed. Later writers say he died in Rome under Nero, and How did Paul die? A death the scriptures never record sets out what the sources give. Paul told the Romans that he hoped to go on to Spain, and no early source shows that he ever did.9
Where Acts and the letters disagree #
This site treats seven letters as Paul’s own: Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon. They were written during the journeys, before Acts, and where they differ from Acts they are the better witness, as Two Pauls explains. On the journeys they differ in several places.
- Paul says he went into Arabia after his call; Acts sends him from Damascus straight to Jerusalem. The gap is examined at Acts and Galatians compared on injil.help.
- Paul swears he saw only Cephas and James on his first visit to Jerusalem (Galatians 1:18–20); Acts has Barnabas bring him “to the apostles” (Acts 9:27).
- Paul says he preached the gospel “from Jerusalem, and round about unto Illyricum”. Acts never takes him there.
- Writing to Corinth on the third journey, before the voyage to Rome, Paul says “thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep”. Acts records none of the three.
Acts, then, does not record every journey, and it arranges the ones it does record. The three-journey scheme is the work of Luke as editor, and it shows Paul as the obedient partner of Jerusalem, a picture Paul’s own letters do not give.
What Paul preached on the journeys #
Acts gives the same pattern in town after town. Paul went first to the synagogue, argued from the scriptures that the Messiah had to suffer and rise, and turned to the Gentiles when the Jews refused him. At Pisidian Antioch he said so in words Acts repeats as a programme: “It was necessary that the word of God should first have been spoken to you: but seeing ye put it from you, and judge yourselves unworthy of everlasting life, lo, we turn to the Gentiles”.
His own summary is shorter: “For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified”. He told the Galatians that the gospel he preached on these journeys came to him by revelation, and that he received it from none of the men who had walked with ʿĪsā ibn Maryam ʿalayhi al-salām, peace be upon him.10 What that gospel taught is set out in Seven doctrines: God, the cross and faith, and how the title he took on these journeys was won is the subject of The apostle to the Gentiles: who gave Paul the title?.
The journeys in the Islamic sources #
The early Muslim historians knew the missions of the apostles from Christian tradition. Ibn Isḥāq lists those whom ʿĪsā ibn Maryam sent out and names “Peter the disciple and Paul with him” for Rome, adding that Paul “belonged to the followers and was not a disciple”.11 Some commentators went further and read the journey to Antioch into the Qurʾān, in the story of the town to which three messengers were sent.
وَٱضۡرِبۡ لَهُم مَّثَلًا أَصۡحَـٰبَ ٱلۡقَرۡيَةِ إِذۡ جَآءَهَا ٱلۡمُرۡسَلُونَ إِذۡ أَرۡسَلۡنَآ إِلَيۡهِمُ ٱثۡنَيۡنِ فَكَذَّبُوهُمَا فَعَزَّزۡنَا بِثَالِثٍ فَقَالُوٓاْ إِنَّآ إِلَيۡكُم مُّرۡسَلُونَ
“And present to them an example: the people of the city, when the messengers came to it. When We sent to them two but they denied them, so We strengthened them with a third, and they said, ‘Indeed, we are messengers to you.’”12
Ibn Kathīr reports the view and names its source:
قال ابن جُرَيْج، عن وهب بن سليمان، عن شعيب الجبائي قال: كان اسم الرسولين الأولين شمعون ويوحنا، واسم الثالث بولص، والقرية أنطاكية.
“Ibn Jurayj said, from Wahb ibn Sulaymān, from Shuʿayb al-Jabaʾī: the names of the first two messengers were Simon and John, the name of the third was Paul, and the town was Antioch.”13
He then rejects it. The first of his reasons is the plain sense of the verses: the verses present the three as messengers of God, where the Antioch story has them sent by al-Masīḥ.
أحدها: أن ظاهر القصة يدل على أن هؤلاء كانوا رسل الله، عز وجل، لا من جهة المسيح
“The first is that the plain sense of the story shows these were messengers of God, Mighty and Majestic, and not from al-Masīḥ.”14
His second reason is history: Antioch accepted the message brought to it, while the town in the Qurʾān was destroyed. The Qurʾān does not tell of Paul’s journeys, and the Muslim scholars who weighed the Antioch reading set it aside.
The journeys in short #
- First journey (about 46–48): Cyprus, Perga, Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra, Derbe.
- Second journey (about 49–52): Galatia, Troas, Philippi, Thessalonica, Berea, Athens, Corinth.
- Third journey (about 53–57): Galatia, Ephesus, Macedonia, Greece, Troas, Miletus, Jerusalem.
- The voyage to Rome (about 59–60): Caesarea, Crete, the shipwreck on Malta, Rome.
The routes are the frame of Paul’s life as Acts tells it. The man who walked them, and what he carried along them, is the case this site makes, beginning with Who was Paul of Tarsus in the Bible?.
- The Gallio inscription at Delphi, a letter of the emperor Claudius naming Gallio as proconsul of Achaia, dated by its reference to Claudius’s twenty-sixth acclamation as emperor; Acts 18:12. The full timeline is in Timeline of Paul’s life. ↩
- Galatians 1:17–18 (KJV; Greek from the SBLGNT). ↩
- Galatians 1:21; Acts 11:25–26 (KJV). On the name Christian, see Was Paul the founder of Christianity?. ↩
- Acts 14:12 (KJV). The Greek names are Zeus and Hermes. How Paul shaped his message for such audiences is set out in Adapting the message to the pagans. ↩
- Acts 15:39 (KJV). The quarrel, and the conflict with Peter at Antioch, are in The parting with Barnabas, and open conflict with Peter. ↩
- Acts 19:10; 20:31 (KJV). ↩
- Acts 21:27–26:32. The claim of citizenship and the appeal are examined in The citizenship and the appeal to Caesar. ↩
- Acts 28:30–31 (KJV; Greek from the SBLGNT). ↩
- Romans 15:24, 28. 1 Clement 5, written in the 90s, says only that he reached “the farthest bounds of the West” (trans. J. B. Lightfoot). ↩
- 1 Corinthians 2:2; Galatians 1:11–12 (KJV). ↩
- Alfred Guillaume (trans.), The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 653. The report is examined in Paul’s own titles, and the tafsīr of Yā Sīn. ↩
- Sūrah Yā Sīn 36:13–14. Qurʾānic verses are rendered after Saheeh International. ↩
- Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, ed. Sāmī al-Salāmah, vol. 6, p. 569, on Yā Sīn 36:14 (shamela.ws/book/8473/3474). ↩
- Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr, vol. 6, p. 573 (shamela.ws/book/8473/3478). His second reason is that Antioch believed in al-Masīḥ, while the town of the verse was destroyed for its unbelief. ↩