“In the Steps of St. Paul.”

Kaikoura Star, Volume LVI, Issue 90, 16 November 1936, Page 4

“In the Steps of St. Paul.”

A SERIES OF ARTICLES BY

H. V. MORTON.

ARTICLE No. 33

During spring, the motorist in Asia Minor must consider the weather with the care of an airman.

The reason is that a few miles from the town the road vanishes into tracks of beaten earth, which ten minutes of heavy rain are enough to turn into quagmires of sticky mud. Therefore, if you intend to make a real journey into the country, you must, unless you are prepared to spend the night in the wilds, choose a rainless day.

When reading apocryphal gospels, 1 have often noticed the frequency with which sudden violent rain descends at the critical moment and quenches flames that were licking the feet of Christian martyrs. Another frequent intervention is the sudden thunderstorm, and the flash of lightning which strikes down rhe enemies of Christianity.

Having seen the extraordinary local cloudbursts so fraquent in the mountains of Asia Minor, rain which can turn a square mile into mud while the rest of the country is dry as a bone, I wonder whether these “miracles” are not. perhaps a memory of this climate. However, the day looked good; and I set off from Konya towards the mountains of the south to find the site of Lystra. The road soon faded into a camel track that ran over a green plain towards distant foothills. My driver, a Turk from Konya, was well used to cross-country driving, and he took his car with the greatest ease over obstacles that no ordinary motorist would have taakled. I wondered what the American manufacturer of this car would have said could he have seen it crossing miles of ploughed fields, leaping small water courses, traversing hills where splintered rocks stood up a foot from the surface of the ground, so that our progress was a kind of obstacle race. As we moved to the south we came suddenly in view of the distant Taurus range, and a more magnificent group of mountains I have never seen in my life. They lay in blue shadow on the edge of the Sky, great clouds rising above them and their sharp peaks whitened with snow. Those mountains explain the presence in Paul’s day of a Roman colony at Lystra. In ancient times the Taurus was full of robbers and bandits. Augustus Caesar was determined to stamp them out and give security to cities of the plain, and therefore settled a number of Roman soldiers at Lystra, giving the place, hitherto a humble Lycaonian town, the dignity of colonial status. The town had Roman magistrates, a native Lycounian population, with a few Greeks and Jews: a population accurately reflected in the narrative of Paul’s visit. The Apostles. Paul and Barnabas, fled from Iconium because the Jews were stirring up trouble against them. As they entered Lystra, Paul saw, as one so frequently sees in the East today, a man who had been a cripple since birth. I suppose he was crouched in the dust of the city gate, begging from travellers; many like him arc begging to-day in Aleppo and Damascus. Paul, after “steadfastly beholding him,” saw “that he had faith to be healed.” He cried in a. loud voice: “Stand upright on thy feet!” And the man leaped and walked. “And when the people saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in the speech of Lycaonia, the gods are come down to us in the likeness of men.’ ’ The reader of the Bible must have often wondered why these Lycaonians jumped to this extravagant conclusion. The reason is that the story of Philemon and. Baucis belongs to this part of Asia Minor and was known to every man, woman, and child who saw St. Paul and St. Barnasbas. The story is that Jupiter, the King of the gods, and Mercury, messenger of the gods, once visited Phygia disguised as mortals, and found no person willing to give them hospitality until they came to the hut of an old couple called Philemon and Baucis. These two old people sheltered the gods and gave them food, with the reward that, when the district was flooded, they were taken to safety while others perished. Their hut was transformed into a splendid temple, of which they became the priests. Naturally, when the Lycaonians saw rhe two commanding strangers and the healed cripple, they believed the old story had been repeated; and they were determined that this time there should be no lack of courtesy to the disguised

deities. “And they called Barnabas, Jupiter; and Paul, Mercurius, because he was the chief speaker.” The Acts of the Apostles is full of unexplained incidents like this, true to local habits and conditions, but not obvious, save to a student of the period Another life-like touch is that neither Paul nor Barnabas understoo l what all the excitement was about, for they had left the Greek-speaking cities of the great trade route and were in a place where native Anatolians were using a local dialect which neither of the Apostles could speak. When they did understand they were horrified! They saw the priest of Jupiter, whose temple stood just outside the city, leading forth garlanded oxen to sacrifice to the gods. “Sirs,” cried the Apostles, rending their garments in dismay, ‘why do ye do these things? We are also men of like passions with you, and preach unto you, that ye should turn from these vanities unto the living God which made heaven and earth, and the sea, and all things that are therein.” Even so, they had difficulty in dissuading the excited Lycaonians from slaying the oxen. Unfortunately a new turn was given to the occasion by the arrival, post-haste from Iconium, of the Jews who had stirred up trouble against the Apostles. These men worked on the passions of the ignorant Ljycaonians, with the result that Paul was taken to the city boundary and stoned until he was believed to be dead. . . . Lystra lies framed against a background of mighty mountains, in a watered vale bright with poplar trees. The bridge that crosses the river to the Turkish village of Katyn Serai is composed of Roman stones taken from Lystra. I saw' altars, tomb-stones, the cornices of temples, all lying together in the fabric of this bridge, and nothing could 'more vividly illustrate the ruin which had fallen on Lystra. • • « • • But where was Lystra? A villager pointed towards a green hill about a mile from the village. There was not one building on it. On the hill side, I discovered in a sheep-fold about fifty enormous squared blocks of stone, probably a relic of the Roman town wall. The hill itself was a mass of broken

pottery. When I stuck the ferrule of my stick into the earth and turned it, I picked out the base and the rims of several ancient bowls.

No doubt beneath this hill are the foundations of the temples and. public buildings of Lystra. On the level ground at the foot of the hill the villager took me to a stone about four feet in height, and I saw with delight that the boundary stone of the colony which definitely established the situation of Lystra, is still in position. For half a century archaeologists and explorers looked for the site of this city, but it was not until 1885, when an American expedition discovered and read this stone, that Lystra ceased to

be a mystery. (Article No. 34 will appear in our