Paphos - Acts 13:5-6

Saul, Barnabas, and according to verse 5, John Mark “being sent forth by the Holy Ghost” sailed to Cyprus. Now just to stop for a second, John Mark isn’t identified that way in verse 5 but is only called “John.” Because there are so many men named “John” in the New Testament account, the IM clarified, “John, who is mentioned in Acts 13:5, is elsewhere called John Mark, Mark, and Marcus. He probably wrote the Gospel According to St. Mark. He was the cousin of Barnabas, and accompanied Saul and Barnabas at the beginning of their first missionary journey.” Just so we don’t get confused with all the different people with similar names, we can set this guy straight in our minds.

Knowing that their destination was Cyrpus we can look at a map from biblearchaeology.org, and see that Cyrpus is the island and the cities of Salamis and Paphos are on opposite ends of that island. Rome had annexed Cyprus, which means invaded and conquered, in 58 BC and installed their own Roman ruler of the country which would have been called “Propraetor.” But instead of keeping them as a tributary state, in 22 BC Rome granted the island country the status of “province” which gave them senatorial rights, and also changed the title of the Roman appointed ruler to “Proconsul.”
The status of the state of Cyprus at the time of Paul’s visit is significant because Luke is very careful to use the proper terms for the Roman rulers which lends credibility to his works. From the website with the map quotes Sir William Ramsay as commenting, “Luke is a historian of the first rank, not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy, he is possessed of the true historic sense… In short this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”
Their first stop is Salamis, which makes sense because as we learn from “walletShrewsbury” from, interestingly enough tripadvisor.com, which I now found was plagiarized from ringofchrist.com, “during this time, Salamis was the island’s primary part, as well as its main commercial center, certainly a city large enough to support multiple synagogues. The temple of Zues, the most important os Salamis, dominated the city. There was an amphitheater, a bath complex, gymnasium, agora and all the principal structures of a thriving city of the Roman Empire.” We aren’t given any information on their acceptance or rejection at Salamis, but next we are told that they went “through the isle unto Paphos.”
The same writer states with some certainty that from Salamis, “they continued from city to city along the southern coastal Roman road of Cyprus, through Amathus and Kourion, major centers of population. They also passed two of the main pagan cult centers of the eastern Mediterranean, those of Apollo at Kouion and Aphrodite at Paleapaphos.” So we know that Apollo is a Greek god, we know that there are many Jews on the island and we can also deduce that there would have been some Roman gods there as well because of the almost 100 year occupation of the island by Roman forces. Again, we aren’t told about any of the acceptance or rejection experienced by the people that this little group taught on their way from Salamis to Paphos, but they do eventually make it to the capital city of Cyprus, which is also the Roman seat of government.
In Paphos, they meet an interesting character named, ironically, Bar-jesus, or “the son of Jesus.” We get some conflicting information about him, that probably made sense at the time but was a huge roadblock for me in understanding what the heck was going on. This Bar-jesus is called a “sorcerer, a false prophet, a Jew.” This was really confusing for me at first, I must have skipped the whole part that he was a Jew because I just imagined that he was a pagan man who had made a deal with the devil and was able to do some crazy stuff like the sorcerers in ancient Egypt whose staffs turned into snakes.
We read all throughout the Old and New Testaments about magicians and sorcerers and soothsayers and familiar spirits but they are never found to be wielded by people professing to follow the true and living God. I would imagine that the offense of working in “dark magic” and doing it in the name of the true God would be especially egregious. If we consider that Cyprus was a very culturally diverse country and that the Jews there were probably at least some what isolated from the mainstream Judaism practiced in Jerusalem, then it’s easy to understand how some of this “apostasy” could have happened. And let’s also remember that the Jews in Jerusalem weren’t doing so hot keeping the religion pure either, so there were changes and power plays on both sides.
This isn’t in the scriptures, but there were some things that I found in some explanatory articles that were interesting and I think make sense, so take this next part with a grain of salt, speculation by Amy. What probably happened was Saul and his little group went to one of the major synagogues in the city of Paphos and started preaching and the leaders of the synagogue felt that their empire was being threatened. Because of what happened in Jerusalem, we can deduce that the Jewish leadership probably accused Saul and his group of blasphemy. Apparently, there is a place in Paphos called St. Paul’s pillar that people visit as a religious site to this day and is known to be the place where Bar-jesus had Paul tied to the stone and whipped 39 times, probably under the pretense of religious tampering. None of this is mentioned in the IM so far that I’ve seen so again, take it for what it’s worth, but it seems to be a pretty common consenses that Saul was whipped at the synagogue in Paphos at the order of Bar-jesus, which sets the stage nicely for what comes next.