It was at Antioch (from perhaps 35 A. D.) that Greek-speaking gentiles first became converted and it was there that the term Christian originated.
Otto Meinardus has written extensively about St. Paul’s travels and here considers a rather curious but now little known story related to the Apostle’s visit to Athens.
Had you come to Athens as a tourist 300 years ago, chances are that one of your primary objectives would have been to search for those sites which in one way or another are related to St. Paul’s ministry in this city as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. New Testament in hand, you would have asked to see the remains of the ancient synagogue where the Apostle argued with the Jews, the agora where St. Paul spoke to those ‘who chanced to be there’, the altar with the inscription ‘To an unknown god’, which served as the subject of St. Paul’s address to the Areopagus, and the rock which the King James Version calls Mars Hill or the Areopagus.
Your overall experience, however, would have been rather disappointing. The site of the agora was built over with houses then, and the ancient synagogue has not been unearthed to this day. Although two visitors to Athens, Nicolas du Loir in 1641, and George Wheler in 1675, were told that the inscription ‘To an unknown god’ could still be seen in the Parthenon (at that time converted into a mosque) the latter dismissed the story, noting that he ‘could find but very little or no probability’.
It is very doubtful that the Greeks or the Turks believed this tradition themselves, but they may well have related it for the benefit of their visitors from the West. Indeed, Guillet de la Guilletiere, who visited here in 1675, tells us among other things that ‘when a stranger is at any time present at the Celebration of the Mass, they [the Greek priests] will be sure instead of the Epistle for the day… to read chapter XVII of the Acts of the Apostles, thinking thereby to enhance their reputation with the stranger’.
Your interest in St. Paul would have next led you to the ruins of a small church at the foot of the Areopagus where you would have been shown, by the priest accompanying you, a small Roman cistern, situated east of the northern apse of the church. Father Robert de Dreux, chaplain to the French ambassador, visited Athens in 1669 and tells us that after having descended from the Areopagus Hill, ‘the priest showed us a well, in which, so he told me, St. Dionysius had hidden St. Paul for a few days’. In the same year the Jesuit missionary, Father Jacques P. Babin, was told that the well existed near the ruins of the Church of St. Dionysius the Areopagite where ‘…St. Paul remained hidden for twenty-four hours in a persecution which his enemies caused against him, following the conversion of this senator of the Areopagus’. In 1674, Jean Giraud of Lyons, the French Consul in Athens, described how, leaving the archbishopric by a little gate, he saw ten feet from there a well, ‘where St. Paul hid himself to escape the furor of the people after he had converted St. Dionysius’.
Whether the well was a place of hiding or a prison seems to have been a matter of opinion, however, because in 1675 Guillet de la Guilletiere was shown it and wrote that ‘the Christians hold [it] in great veneration,* because they maintain that it served as a prison for St. Paul…’ The last travellers to report about St. Paul’s well before the Venetian attack upon Athens in 1687 were Jacob Spon and George Wheler. They visited the city in 1675-1676 and reported that ‘of the Church of St. Dionysius there is nothing to be seen now but a heap of ruins, and a well, where they say, St. Paul had hid himself…’
The tradition of St. Paul’s suffering in Athens, of which St. Luke was totally unaware, was intensely believed and widely circulated and survived the upheavals in Athens that followed the Venetian attack and the Turkish invasion. Charles Comte de Ferriol visited here in 1699 and was shown the well but sometime during the first part of the 18th century the cistern was obstructed and Richard Chandler in
1765-1766 described it as being choked up. Nonetheless we know that by the latter part of the eighteenth century it was furnishing water for a nearby settlement of Moors which gave the site the popular name of karasouyiou (the Moors), a name which included the Areopagus itself, but otherwise the site was known as ‘Arabiko Pigadi’ (Arabian Well) because of the number of Arab families residing in the neighbourhood.
When J. C. Hobhouse, in the company of Lord Byron, visited the Areopagus in 1810, he was shown not a well but a cave, below the small chapel of St. Dionysius, which contains a cold spring (perhaps the fountain mentioned by Pausanias as being near the temple of Apollo and Pan) as the site where St. Paul found shelter. Perhaps the last statement about St. Paul’s escape comes from the pen of William Turner in 1813. Other travellers of the 19th and 20th century, though still referring to the ruins of the Church of St. Dionysius, are silent on the subject.
It is a strange story, and totally unfounded in Scripture, and we do not know how this tradition started. Is it possible that the Athenians tried to satisfy the curiosity of their visitors from the West? (Certainly the tenor of the story is in line with the reactions to the Apostle’s preaching in Philippi, Thessaloniki and Veria, where he was either imprisoned or threatened to the point where he was forced to leave these cities.) What is surprising is that none of the early travellers seemed to have questioned the veracity of this extra-biblical tale except for Edward Dodwell, who reported on his archaeological finds during 1801-1806, and had read the tradition of St. Paul’s escape in the writings of George Wheler. But he merely commented that ‘it was a very improbable story, and very inconsistent with the noble and intrepid character of the apostle’.
Today neither the members of the clergy nor the tourist guides around the Acropolis are aware of the story of St. Paul’s escape from the angry Athenians. Few people visit the excavations of the Church of St. Dionysius below the Areopagus, and fewer still would take notice of the ‘well’, nowadays completely choked up, situated a few feet behind the apse.
St. Paul in Greece, by Otto F. A. Meinardus (Lycabettus Press) is available in most bookshops in Athens.
