Philippi: Trouble.

So, there's this girl in Philippi who is possessed by some sort of spirit that provides her a kind of special knowledge. Some guys in town have enslaved her and are selling her fortune telling abilities for their own profit. Anyway, the girl follows Paul around for days saying, "These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the message of salvation." While what she is saying is true, Paul is annoyed. So, he casts out her demon. The girl's owners get livid, their business is gone.

These guys get a crowd together and drag Paul and Silas (no one really knows why Luke and Timothy are not brought) to the rostrum, where public inquiries would be heard. Here is my tour leader, Dr. Sparks, standing on the rostrum.


The crowd gets out of control and in the midst of the arguing, Paul and Silas are beaten with rods. Their accusations against Paul and Silas are not legitimate, they've broken no Roman law. But, the magistrate/sheriff/jailer decides Paul and Silas need to go to prison, mainly to protect them from further harm and to calm the crowd. Rome gets angry with cities that can't keep control and they don't want the heat.

Paul and Silas sit in prison singing and praying. At midnight, an earthquake allows the doors of the prison to open, freeing all the prisoners. The magistrate/sheriff/jailer decides suicide looks like a good idea (much better than what Rome would do to him) until Paul stops him. Long story short, the magistrate/sheriff/jailer believes the gospel, is baptized with all his household, and invites Paul and Silas over to his house for some food and wound-care. Pretty amazing. Here is the Philippian jail... most likely the place Paul and Silas were singing and praying that night. Also pretty amazing.


So, by morning, the higher ups figure out that the jail is empty and go to the magistrate/sheriff/jailer's house. Paul and Silas are there and the men are so stunned at the miraculous getaway that they tell them they are officially set free (which is ironic because they're obviously not in prison anymore anyway.) Paul gets touchy, "This is scandalous! I'm not just going to walk away after the injustice that has happened to me as if everything is ok! I'm a Roman citizen and I was beaten and imprisoned last night without a hearing." The higher ups get scared. "Wow. We didn't know that, guess we should have asked first. Ummmm, how about you leave town before we get bad publicity?" So, Paul and crew head to Lydia's house one more time to encourage this little fledgling church and move on to Thessalonica. More on that later.


Above is the Roman agora in Philippi. The agora was the marketplace and center of a Roman city. Paul would have walked through this "shopping center."


This is a floor mosaic from the Basilica of Paul in Philippi (around 300s AD.) If you are a good Greek alphabet student, you can see Paul's name written in the bottom, left hand corner. While Philippi was mostly empty towards the end of the Roman empire, Christians did move in for a while because of it's significance in the book of Acts. The city suffered from a major earthquake in the 600s (it's on a fault line) and by the 1000s AD it was totally abandoned. Most of the archaeological work in the modern era has been done by the University of Thessaloniki.


This is Basilica B, one of the most prominent remains of the ruins of Philippi. Jin Ji was turning for a pose but I just missed him, oh well.


I could not get this photo to rotate to save my life but this is the Via Egnatia, which makes its way through Philippi. Just turn your head slightly.


An ancient version of backgammon etched on the sidewalk for people to play.


Philippian graffiti.


Philippian toilets, near the Roman gymnasium. You can see the toilet seats in a row down the middle, there were no "stalls" but it was all girls or all boys depending on the day.


The Roman theatre in Philippi.