Tarsus

That was his trade.

That was the trade of his hometown in Tarsus.

They actually had these, like, shaggy goats there with, like, nice long hair.

They look really nice and shaggy.

Oh.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and Tarsus is very famous for their very special long-haired goats.

Okay.

She would very much have liked to penetrate farther east to Nisibis and then on to Ur of the Chaldees, but the bishop dissuaded her on the ground that that district was now in the hands of the Persians, no longer the Romans, see p. 39.

She was content therefore to go only six miles out and see the well from which Jacob watered Rachel's flocks, at a place called Fadanna, the Padan Aram of Genesis 28.2. She then returned to Antioch and pursued her westward journey through Cilicia till she came to Tarsus.

Here she made another detour by way of Pompeiopolis or Soli and Corychus, both on the seacoast, in order to pay a special visit to the tomb of St. Thecla in Issuria, where she met to her great delight her dear friend Marthana, whom she had known in Jerusalem, see note on p. 29.

Coming back to Tarsus, she made her way without further delay by Mopsocrin, which she calls Mansocrinae, and under Mount Taurus, through Cappadocia, Galatia, and Bithynia, until she arrived at Chalcedon and stopped there for the famous shrine of St. Euphemia, and finally arrived at Constantinople.

There she visited the Church of the Apostles, p. 44, and many other of the martyria with which the city abounded, and still indefatigable, tells her beloved sisters that while she is preparing this narrative for them there, and also, it seems, drawing up her account of the services and rites which she had witnessed at Jerusalem, she will not actually leave her home till she has crossed into Asia once again and visited the martyrium of St. John at Ephesus.

If anything further remains to tell and her life is spared, she will relate it in person or in another letter.

The place was also shown to me where Rachel stole her father's images.

So having seen everything in the name of God, and bidding farewell to the holy bishop and the holy monks who had deigned to conduct us to the place, we returned by the route and by the stations through which we had come from Antioch.

What we should eat and what we should gaze upon was still wrapped in the mystery of the great unknown.

X took a pencil and marked a straight line from Constantinople across the Anatolian Plateau and the Taurus Mountains to Tarsus.

"That looks a good point to make for," she said.

"Alexander led an army over the Taurus." Then, having stopped within measurable distance of the sea, she drew her pencil eastwards across the Euphrates to a point on the Tigris high up in the Kurdistan Mountains.

Each step forward now unrolled bit by bit the stretch of plain at our feet.

There was the Sidnus winding its easy course through fertile lands, as if there was no trouble in its rising waters.

There were Tarsus, its flat roofs so sunk in gardens and fruit trees that minarets and domes alone proclaimed the presence of a large town.

And there, too, still faint and dim, but unmistakable, was the thin, moving line of smoke which proclaimed that we were nearing the land of the monster once more.

Now, who was Paul? In the book of Acts, on an occasion when Paul was defending himself before a Roman commander of the Jerusalem garrison, he said that he was a citizen of no mean city.

The city was Tarsus in Cilicia, and he said it was no mean city, no ordinary city in a modest sort of way.

Tarsus was a Gentile city.

It was the seat of a well-known university.

And this means, since Paul lived there, and especially since he apparently came from a rather well-to-do family, that in his early days he presumably had a thoroughly Gentile education.

And in Acts chapter number 22 in verse number three, again, this is Paul giving his testimony.

In verse number three the Bible says, "I am verily a man which am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, yet brought up in the city at the feet of Gamaliel, and taught according to the perfect manner of the law of the fathers, and was zealous towards God, as ye all are this day.

And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering unto prisons both men and women.

As also the high priest doth bear me witness, and all the estate of the elders: from whom also I've received elders unto the brethren, And went to..." What's the next word? Damascus.

There, okay.

That's Corinth, and of course Paul was born in Asia Minor in Tarsus, right there.

And then most of Paul's journeys, the origin point of them was Antioch, which is this city here.

So most of this world was a Greek-speaking world because of Alexander the Great, who had conquered this region.

So, during the long journey in Paul's footsteps, we felt every day that we could see him more clearly.

We walked in Tarsus, the city where he was born, and saw boys repeating the verses that he learned there.

With him we watched the tawny river Cydnus run from the white mountains of Taurus through the great plain down to the shimmering sea.

From Jerusalem, where, as an undergraduate, he sat at the feet of Gamaliel, we followed him to Caesarea, where the foundations of the great Roman citadel in which Paul stood before Felix and Festus still defy the breakers of the Mediterranean, and to Damascus, where you can still walk under the Roman arch through the city wall that led him into the street called Straight, and watch the tent-maker at work in the bazaar.

This life of Paul the Tarsian has been written after I had taken these journeys personally, and having read books in which the life of Paul, the truth of the book of Acts, and the Pauline authorship of the letters is discussed, and after having studied the life of the Roman Empire round the Mediterranean in the time of Paul and Nero.

Everything stated in the book I believe to be historically true and accurate in detail.

The life of Saul in Tarsus, for instance, is built up of details which must inevitably have happened to a Jewish boy living in Tarsus at that time, and from a reconstruction of Roman Tarsus itself based on reading, observation, and conversations on the spot.

But I should have no confidence even then in hoping for this historical accuracy had not Dr. Bartlett of Mansfield College Oxford read the whole book and given most valuable criticism and suggestion, while Dr. Christie of Tarsus, Dr. Masterman of Jerusalem, Canon Hanauer and Dr. Frank McKinnon of Damascus, Dr. Dodd of Conia, Iconium, and Miss Cathapothekes of Athens have contributed priceless assistance with regard to the places where their knowledge is so intimate and authoritative.