Philippi

Philippi stood on the Via Egnatia in eastern Macedonia, a city Philip II of Macedon had fortified centuries earlier. In 42 BC, Antony and Octavian defeated Brutus and Cassius there, and after Octavian's later victory at Actium he resettled the city with Roman army veterans and granted it ius Italicum, the legal standing of Italian soil. That history is exactly why Luke calls it "the Roman colony of Philippi, the leading city of that district of Macedonia." Paul reached it after a vision of a man of Macedonia pleading for help, and the first convert was not a man of standing but a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, who met Paul and Silas at a place of prayer by the river outside the city gate. The Lord opened her heart, and she and her household were baptized. A slave girl who made money for her owners by fortune-telling followed Paul for days until he cast the spirit out of her in the name of Jesus Christ. Her owners, furious at the lost income, dragged Paul and Silas before the magistrates, who had them stripped, beaten with rods, and thrown into the inner cell with their feet in the stocks. At midnight, while Paul and Silas prayed and sang, an earthquake shook the prison, every door flew open, and every chain came loose. The jailer, about to kill himself rather than face the shame of an escape, was stopped by Paul's shout that all the prisoners were still there. His question, "what must I do to be saved," and Paul's answer, are the center of the whole account, and by the hour was out his household had believed and been baptized. When daylight came the magistrates tried to send Paul and Silas away quietly, and Paul refused, insisting on the public acknowledgment owed to men who had been beaten without trial though they were Roman citizens. Years later Paul wrote his letter to this same church, and its opening line, "to all the saints in Christ Jesus at Philippi," and its record of gifts that reached him again and again, both trace back to this first visit.