Paul’s Second Missionary Journey Explained (4 of 12)

This is the journey where the gospel crosses into Europe, and it begins with two apostles falling out badly enough to separate.

It also contains the single most useful date in the New Testament.

Why Did Paul and Barnabas Separate?

Over John Mark, and Acts does not smooth it over.

Acts 15:36-40. Paul proposes revisiting the churches. Barnabas wants to bring Mark. Paul judges it unwise to take someone who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not continued with them in the work.

The text says they had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. That is strong language and Luke leaves it standing without assigning blame.

The result is two missions instead of one. Barnabas takes Mark to Cyprus. Paul takes Silas through Syria and Cilicia.

And years later, from prison, Paul writes in 2 Tim 4:11 to get Mark and bring him, because he is useful for ministry. The rupture is recorded and the repair is recorded, decades apart, in different books, without commentary.

Who Was Timothy?

A young disciple from Lystra who joined here and stayed for the rest of Paul’s life.

Acts 16:1-3 has Paul finding him at Lystra, well spoken of by the believers there, with a Jewish believing mother and a Greek father.

He becomes what Paul calls his true son in the faith, co-sender of six letters, and the man to whom the final letter is addressed. He also spends years in Ephesus holding a difficult church together on Paul’s instruction.

What Was the Macedonian Call?

A closed door, then another closed door, then a vision.

Acts 16:6-10 records them being kept by the Spirit from speaking in Asia, then trying to enter Bithynia and being prevented again. They come down to Troas, on the coast, out of options.

There Paul sees a man of Macedonia standing and begging him to come over and help them. They conclude God has called them to preach there and leave at once.

Two things about that passage. The gospel crosses from Asia into Europe at that decision. And the narrative switches to we at verse 10, which is where the author appears to join the party.

What Happened at Philippi?

The first European church was planted through a businesswoman, a slave girl, and a jailer.

Acts 16:14 has Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from Thyatira, whose heart the Lord opened to respond. Her household is the first baptised in Europe, and her home becomes the base.

Then the exorcism of a slave girl whose owners lose their income, the beating, and the imprisonment. Acts 16:25-26: about midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns and the other prisoners were listening, when an earthquake shook the foundations.

The jailer’s question in Acts 16:30-31 is one of the most direct in Scripture, and so is the answer.

Then Acts 16:37, where Paul plays the citizenship card he had withheld: they beat us publicly without a trial, even though we are Roman citizens, and now they want to send us away quietly. Let them come themselves and escort us out.

That is not wounded pride. Flogging an untried citizen was a serious offence, and forcing a public apology established that the new church had not been founded by criminals. He took the beating and then used it.

What Did Paul Preach in Athens?

The most famous cross-cultural sermon in the New Testament, built from their own altar.

The Areopagus was both a limestone hill between the Acropolis and the agora and, by association, the council that met on or near it. That body began as an advisory council to Athens’s kings, lost influence under the democracy, recovered by the fourth century BC, handled judicial matters including murder trials, and by the Roman period had become the city’s chief administrative authority.

Which changes what kind of occasion this was. Paul was brought before that council rather than drawn into a conversation in the square, and it was probably a formal hearing rather than an informal one. The likely charge was introducing new deities without the required permission, which fell squarely inside the council’s authority over new religious teaching in the city.

So this is his first recorded defence speech, delivered to a body with jurisdiction, and it should be read as one.

Acts 17:22-23 has him beginning from an altar inscribed to an unknown god, and telling the philosophers that what they worship in ignorance is what he proclaims. He quotes their own poets at verse 28.

Then he lands it. Acts 17:30-32: God has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed, and has given proof of this by raising him from the dead.

The reaction splits three ways. Some sneer. Some say they will hear him again. Some believe, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris.

Before Athens comes Berea, where Acts 17:11 records that they received the message eagerly and examined the Scriptures daily to see whether what Paul said was true. That is the standard for hearing any teacher, and it is applied to an apostle.

Why Does the Gallio Inscription Matter?

Because it is the fixed peg the whole chronology of Paul’s life hangs on.

Acts 18:12-16 places Paul before Gallio, proconsul of Achaia, when opponents at Corinth brought a united charge against him. Gallio dismissed the case as an internal dispute about words and names in their own law.

Seven fragments of an inscription found at Delphi preserve a rescript of the emperor Claudius, and the dating formula in it refers to his twenty-sixth acclamation as imperator. That acclamation falls between the end of AD 51 and the first of August 52.

From there the arithmetic runs. Governors of that rank normally took office around the first of July and served a year, so Gallio was in post from the summer of 51. The confrontation in Acts reads as happening shortly after he arrived, which places it in the summer or autumn of that year. Paul had been in Corinth eighteen months by then, so his arrival falls in early 50.

That gives one point in Paul’s career an external anchor precise to within months, and everything else is calculated forward and backward from it.

Without Gallio, Pauline chronology would be a set of relative sequences with no fixed date. With him it becomes a timeline.

Paul stayed at Corinth a year and a half, working as a tentmaker alongside Aquila and Priscilla, encouraged by a night vision in Acts 18:9-10 telling him to keep speaking because the Lord had many people in that city.

A doorway inscription found at Corinth reads Synagogue of the Hebrews, and appears to date to roughly his period. It may mark the building where he taught week after week before the split.

What Did Paul Write from Corinth?

1 and 2 Thessalonians, among the earliest Christian documents in existence.

They were written to a church only weeks old, under persecution, and anxious about members who had died before the Lord returned.

1 Thess 4:13-17 answers that directly: he does not want them uninformed about those who sleep, so that they do not grieve like those who have no hope, because the dead in Christ will rise first.

Grief is permitted there. Despair is retired. That distinction is doing pastoral work and it is doing it in what may be the oldest surviving Christian letter.

2 Thessalonians then corrects the opposite problem, a panic that the day of the Lord had already come, and adds the flat instruction in 2 Thess 3:10 that anyone unwilling to work should not eat. Expecting the end is not a reason to stop working.

Part of a series following the Apostle Paul timeline.

Footnotes2

1. The Gallio inscription is the reason Pauline chronology can be stated in years at all. It is a fragmentary imperial letter mentioning Gallio as proconsul, datable from its own internal references, and it converts a relative sequence of journeys into an absolute timeline. Very little in first-century Christian history has that kind of anchor.
2. Paul's use of citizenship at Philippi is often read as a moment of temper. It is better read as strategy. He allowed the illegal beating to happen and then made the magistrates come in person, which put the young church under the protection of an admitted official error rather than leaving it associated with troublemakers.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Acts 15:36-18:22, 1 Thess 1:9-10, 4:13-17, 5:16-18, and 2 Thess 2:1-3, 3:10.

The Gallio inscription at Delphi. The external anchor dating Gallio's proconsulship of Achaia to approximately AD 51 to 52.

Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003), 585-586. Supports the seven Delphi fragments, the twenty-sixth acclamation of Claudius, the dating of Gallio's term, and the calculation back to Paul's arrival in Corinth in early 50.

Paul J. Martin, "Areopagus," in Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Holman, 2015), 114. Supports the history of the council and its authority over new religious teaching in the city.

Paul Copan and Kenneth D. Litwak, The Gospel in the Marketplace of Ideas (IVP, 2018), 71-72. Supports the reading of the Areopagus appearance as a formal hearing and the probable charge.

John R. McRay, "Archaeology and the New Testament," in Dictionary of New Testament Background (InterVarsity Press, 2000), 98. Supports the politarch inscriptions from Thessalonica and the surrounding cities.

F. F. Bruce, Jesus and Christian Origins Outside the New Testament, 200. Supports the Synagogue of the Hebrews inscription at Corinth.

Where the sourcing stops: the identification of the we passages as marking the author's presence is the standard reading and is discussed at length in the post on Luke. The relative dating of 1 and 2 Thessalonians to each other is generally but not universally agreed.