The Seven Churches of Revelation You Can Still Visit Today (Bible Archaeology Tour)

These weren't symbolic locations in the abstract.

They were real cities with real communities receiving real messages in the first century.

And when you visit them today, you're not just looking at ruins, you're tracing the geography of the early church itself.

So we'll first go over Patmos and the Apostle John.

So before we get... into the seven churches themselves, we should probably step back and ask, where does this entire message come from, the book of Revelation?

Yeah, so of course it comes from and is associated with the Apostle John.

So early Christian tradition holds that John was exiled to the island of Patmos.

He had been preaching in opposition to Roman emperor worship that was popular at the time.

And so he was seen as a political threat because he was having this effect of converting and bringing more to Christianity all through Asia Minor area.

So what is now a very lovely island today, Patmos at the time was just a Roman penal colony.

And so there's no city, there's not really infrastructure.

You know, you kind of just get sent there expecting that you're not going to come back and you got to kind of work pretty hard to survive.

So the Apostle John really only survived there because he had developed so many followers and converted so many in Ephesus.

that were among especially the wealthy silversmiths and people like that.

So they would send him food and supplies.

So that literally, you know, kept him alive on the island until he was later allowed to leave.

You know, one emperor dies, next one, you know, less concerned with being worshipped and wanting to change things politically.

But it's on Patmos that he receives the visions that will make up the letters that he would write that became the book of Revelation as we have it today.

So, you know, from there, he directed the messages to the seven real churches that were located in Asia Minor at the same time.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

So Patmos itself is not one of the seven churches, but where the message begins, right?

Right.

So that was where John was stuck when he received the visions in the cave that you can still go and visit today.

It's quite neat.