Acts19chapter 19

The temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, four times the size of the Parthenon, and it made the city rich. Pilgrims came from across Asia, and the temple also functioned as a bank. Silversmiths sold miniature shrines and images as souvenirs and votive offerings — a whole industry built on devotion.

Paul taught daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus, and an early manuscript adds that he used it from the fifth hour to the tenth — roughly eleven to four, the long midday break when the city stopped work and the hall stood empty. He was preaching on his lunch hour after a morning at the bench.

Ephesus was famous for magic; written spells were so associated with the city that they were called "Ephesian letters." When converts burned their scrolls, Luke prices the bonfire at fifty thousand pieces of silver — if these were drachmas, roughly fifty thousand days' wages for a labourer. Real money went up in smoke.

The theatre cut into the hillside held around twenty-five thousand people. An unsanctioned mass gathering there was legally perilous: Rome punished cities for riot, and the town clerk — the city's chief executive officer, personally answerable to the Roman authorities — says exactly that when he warns they could be charged over the day's uproar. His advice to use the courts and the regular assembly is sound Roman procedure.