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CHAPTER 1

A Foreign World

Ephesus in the First Century

S. M. Baugh

In the twenty years since the first version of this essay appeared, a handful of general studies related to the Ephesian historical background of the New Testament have appeared. And some other studies of 1 Timothy 2:9–15 have also been published that make at least some reference to background material.

The two earlier versions of this essay had focused on presenting an overview of the society of Ephesus, particularly in contrast with certain popular presentations of this city, as relevant background to 1 Timothy 2:9–15 (its Sitz im Leben). This exploration had arisen not long after I intensively studied the city of Ephesus in the Pauline period from every ancient source available — literary, epigraphic (inscriptions), archaeological, numismatic (coins), and so forth — as well as from relevant secondary works. I have subsequently kept an eye on Ephesus, even though my teaching duties and interests have led me into other areas of New Testament studies.

The inscriptions from Ephesus are particularly valuable historical sources, and we possess an amazing wealth of them in Greek and Latin (some six thousand) from this city alone. The Österreichisches Archäologisches Institut (Austrian Archeological Institute) in Vienna has spearheaded excavation of this area for over a century. On epigraphy, one of the more prominent ancient historians writes, "Though we must always be conscious of how much inscriptions will not tell us ... it is still the case that inscriptions, read in bulk, provide the most direct access which we can have to the life, social structure, thought and values of the ancient world."

Hence, while the earlier forms of this essay provided much technical information, I have revised this version to make the subject matter clearer to the nonspecialist in ancient history and classical studies by trimming the bulk of the footnote references to secondary literature. At the same time, I cite ancient sources fully. The design of the essay is to begin with some methodological clarifications and then to move to general observations on Ephesian social institutions. After that, we will narrow in on points that illuminate the historical background of 1 Timothy 2 to help us exegete it accurately.

When analyzing any past culture, historians distinguish between the role and influence of individuals and the fundamental role of political, social, cultural, and religious institutions in the place and time of study. Individuals are interesting and may have some historical effect, but institutions give distinctive shape to any people and place, much like bone structure shapes a person's body. People come and go, but institutions are preserved and propagated through the generations with only slow incremental changes over time, absent a revolution of some sort where individual leaders (like Augustus) may make permanent, radical changes to institutions. Unfortunately, some scholars overlook this focus on institutions when discussing the historical background of 1 Timothy 2:9–15 or other biblical passages.

In light of the focus on institutions, it is important to stress that the same powerful individuals and groups normally controlled all the various institutions of the period we are discussing. For example, the Roman emperors obviously dominated politics in the Mediterranean world, but they also often engaged in legislative attempts to regulate Roman families and served as the pontifex maximus ("Supreme Priest") of Rome. Hence they played sometimes central roles not only in the political institutions but also in the social and religious institutions of the early imperial period.

The time frame of our discussion is the early to mid-AD 60s, when 1 Timothy was most probably written. While any ancient historian knows that we must sift through evidence from other periods to illuminate a very narrow time frame like this, we can only safely use some such evidence while other such evidence requires serious qualifications. We will return to this caveat again when we look at second- and third-century Ephesus below, whose evidence must be scrutinized very carefully if it is to bear any relevance for mid-first-century Ephesus.

Historical Sketch

Ephesus, along with other colonies, was founded on the west coast of modern Turkey by Greek adventurers roughly around the time of the Israelite judges. The physical setting for ancient Ephesus was highly favorable, especially for commerce. It had a natural harbor nearby for overseas trade, and a royal road up the nearby Maeander River valley connected the city inland with important routes for eastern passage and trade.

Some myths have it that mythical female warriors ("Amazons") originally founded Ephesus (Strabo, Geogr. 11.5.4; Pausanias, Descr. 7.4–5), yet the Ephesians themselves officially ascribed the foundation of their city to a Greek hero named Androclus. An oracle directed him to establish the city at the site where he killed a boar while hunting (Strabo, Geogr. 14.1.3, 21; Pliny the Elder, Nat. 5.115). The Ephesians called Androclus "the creator of our city" (IvE 501) and celebrated the city's foundation annually as "Androclus day" (IvE 644). They also featured him on their coins.

Ephesus's cultural heritage was Greek. Yet from the time King Croesus of Lydia captured it in the sixth century BC, Ephesus never enjoyed independence from foreign domination. Croesus, Cyrus, Darius, Athens, Sparta, Alexander, Lysimachus, the Seleucids, the Attalids, Mithridates, and finally the Romans all captured or controlled Ephesus in their turns. The city's political life was dominated by kings, tyrants, satraps, bureaucrats, and proconsuls. As a result, Ephesus's mood was pragmatic and politically accommodating. "All is in flux" was the famous dictum of the Ephesian philosopher Heraclitus, well expressing the city's adaptability to changing political climates. At the time of Paul, the political climate was Roman, and the Ephesians showed a persistent interest in retaining and reviving ancestral Ephesian laws and customs where they could within the broad constraints of Roman rule.

Ephesus had suffered terrible economic and political turmoil in the first century BC. During the final civil war of the Roman republic, Mark Antony had selected Ephesus as one of his main headquarters, and while there, he pillaged Ephesus and the temple of Artemis Ephesia (the Artemisium) of money, materiel, and manpower: "[H]e stripped many noble families of their property and gave it away to rogues and flatterers" (Plutarch, Ant. 24). But then Octavian (Augustus) defeated Antony in the naval battle at Actium in 31 BC, which paved the way for the imperial revolution. Ephesus held its breath as Augustus consolidated his power. Would he punish the city with crushing penalties since it had supported Antony? In fact, Augustus treated Ephesus favorably, even confirming its position as the judicial and financial capital of the Roman province.

Ephesus, however, did not grow and prosper overnight. Although the wealth of Ephesus enjoyed a broad base (banking, fishing, agricultural products, commerce, slaves), the city had a fundamentally agrarian economy, like all in antiquity, which could not grow instantly. The city also suffered a setback in AD 23 when a major earthquake caused serious damage to some public buildings that had to be rebuilt or replaced through private donations. This took time.

Yet the Roman peace was starting to pay off in the middle of the first century. Paul stepped into a city well on its way to eclipsing its old rivals Miletus, Smyrna, and Pergamum as "the greatest and first metropolis of Asia" (IvE 22 et al.). With a population somewhere around one hundred thousand people and growing even more in the next century, Ephesus eventually was on a path to become one of the largest and most important cities in the empire, next to Rome.

But we need to highlight one more political issue. In the early part of the AD 60s, when 1 Timothy was written, the Roman Empire was not as secure as may sometimes appear from our vantage point, knowing how things turned out.

In AD 54, Nero succeeded his adoptive father, the Emperor Claudius, largely through the influence of his mother, Julia Agrippina ("the Younger"; AD 15–59). He was seventeen years old, and Agrippina expected to control her young son and to significantly influence imperial affairs. Things did not go according to Agrippina's plan, particularly when Nero had her murdered in March of AD 59, in part because of his suspicion that she was plotting his overthrow. Because Agrippina had been popular in some circles, her death, particularly since it was a matricide, contributed to the eventual downfall of Nero. After several unsuccessful coup attempts, Nero opted to commit suicide in June AD 68 to avoid assassination. A civil war ensued with the rise of three imperial claimants in brief succession — Galba, Otho, and Vitellius — until Vespasian (AD 69–79) broke off his campaign against the Jewish uprising to take firm control in Rome in December of 69 (with sons Titus [AD 79–81] and Domitian [AD 81–96] to follow as emperors).

Therefore, in the shaky part of the Neronian period, when 1 Timothy was written, the people living at the time could not have foreseen the fate of the Roman empire. Would Rome devolve into another massively destructive civil war (which did erupt briefly in AD 68–69)? The Ephesians (including the many Romans residing there) could not have been sure whom to support and how things would turn out, which weakens claims that Rome wielded hegemonic cultural influence in places like Ephesus at this time. Certainty did not really arrive until the rise of Vespasian and his successors, whose policies established a political stability that made it clear to all by the second century that the Roman imperial system was in the provinces to stay (at least until the third century; see below).

Two more preliminary issues from Ephesian history impact our understanding of this city-state and condition our use of evidence from later periods for the Pauline era. One scholar who has investigated the issue believes that outright famines occurred relatively rarely in the ancient world (often combined with plague-type diseases), but that food shortages were quite common. Evidence for food shortage in Ephesus comes from an order by Emperor Domitian that one-half of the vineyards be dug up in light of a scarcity of grain (Philostratus, Vit. soph. 520; Suetonius, Dom. 7.2). More seriously, in AD 129 the Ephesians honored the Emperor Hadrian for allowing grain importation from Egypt (IvE 274), no doubt alleviating a serious grain shortage and possibly a famine. Problems with grain availability continued, evidenced by Ephesian bakers' guild strikes (IvE 215) and by bread prices doubling from the beginning to the end of the second century (IvE 910, 923, 924, 934, 938, 3010).

While Ephesus greatly prospered in the first half of the second century, the second half brought the worst of times. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 161–80) used Ephesus as the central debarkation point for Roman troops when he invaded Parthia (Persia). This decision severely affected Ephesus and most other cities in the empire when troops returning from the siege of Seleucia to the west via Ephesus in the winter of 165/66 brought back with them a particularly devastating plague (possibly smallpox). The exact proportion of the population that died from this plague remains unknown, but this was, in fact, a turning point in Ephesian history; the city saw a significant downturn in civic building activity, and officials searched ever harder for patrons of their civic and cultic institutions. These bad times turned to terrible times when Roman power failed to protect one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World (discussed below) from a tribe of marauding Goths who took and looted the Artemisium in AD 262/63. This disaster was a haymaker for Ephesian glory (and certainly for Artemis Ephesia worship) in the ancient world.

This general historical sketch cautions us against importing later cultural practices and Roman influences directly into mid-first-century Ephesus, as is sometimes done in modern treatments of 1 Timothy 2. Pauline Ephesus must be understood from sources that are relevant to that period. As we will see, knowing the particulars of Ephesian institutions in the Pauline era plays an important role in understanding what Paul meant in his discussion of women in 1 Timothy 2.

Civic Institutions

A thorough presentation of all the institutions of Ephesus is not possible here, but in general, one must conclude from the abundant extant evidence (including an estimated six thousand recovered inscriptions) that Ephesus resembled other Hellenic city-states of the time with a fundamentally patriarchal social and political structure. However, as we will note below, some individual women rose to prominence in Ephesus, particularly in the second and third centuries (see the historical sketch above for possible reasons). But in the first century, based on our substantial evidence base, no women at all filled municipal magistracies (the prytany will be explained below), though a few did fill particular high-status priesthoods in the city and province. So the city is still best described as somewhat typically patriarchal.

The municipal organization of Ephesus formally resembled the Athenian democratic model, with the male citizen body ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) divided into tribes ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) comprising the state assembly ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; see Acts 19:39). The municipal ruling body was the 450-member State Council ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), which was presided over by the secretary of the people ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), familiar to us from Acts 19:35–40. We know the names of scores of men who filled these magistracies and other civic functions (e.g., "market director" [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]], "supervisor of the gymnasia" [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]], and "sheriff" [[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]]; cf. Mart. Pol. 6.2). From the first century, some of these men include Heraclides III (IvE 14); Tatianus (IvE 492); Tib. (i.e., Tiberius) Claudius Aristion (IvE 234–35 et al.; Pliny, Ep. 6.31); C. Julius Didymus (Neue Inschriften IX, 120–21); Alexander Memnon, son of Artemidorus (IvE 261); and L. Cusinius (IvE 659B, 716, et al.). Either Alexander Memnon or L(ucius) Cusinius could possibly be the secretary of the people in Acts 19:35–40.

One group of some three hundred-plus members had extraconstitutional but real influence in Ephesus, the gerousia ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) or "Old Men's Society." The Romans thought of this group as similar to their Senate. There is no way of knowing its exact public role, but it was undoubtedly significant and represented the most powerful families in the city.

That central families of Ephesus controlled the city over generations should not surprise us, given the role of patronage, benefaction, and wealth in the patriarchal Greco-Roman world. Let me illustrate this reality with a few sample individuals and the extent of their civic involvement and magistracies in Ephesus.

The first civic patron is probably the most famous: Tib. Claudius Aristion, who was asiarch (and high priest of Asia) three times (see Acts 19:31), secretary of the people, prytanis (see below), temple-guardian (neocoros), and gymnasiarch (IvE 234–35, 239, 424–25, 427, 508, 638, 1498, 3046, 5101, 5113). His fame comes from being one of only two first-century men known to have appealed to Caesar (Pliny the Younger, Ep. 6.31 [he was acquitted]) — the other, of course, wrote 1 Timothy. Pliny the Younger calls Aristion "the leading man [princeps] of the Ephesians" but politically harmless. That is, he was no threat to Roman rule (see [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], "insurrection," above).

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