---
title: "Where the coordinates come from"
canonical: "https://paulineletters.com/explore/methodology/coordinates"
published: "2026-08-01"
updated: "2026-08-14"
license: "https://paulineletters.com/explore/license"
source: "Pauline Letters"
---

# Where the coordinates come from

> A map that places every site with equal confidence is lying about at least some of them, so precision is recorded per place rather than assumed.

**Where do the coordinates on Paul’s route actually come from?**

From published ancient-world gazetteers — principally Pleiades, ToposText, and the Digital Atlas of the Roman Empire — cross-checked against secure modern identifications. Each place also records how well it is known: an excavated site, a city centroid, a debated identification, or a region with no single point at all.

## Four kinds of certainty, recorded separately

Some places on this route are excavated sites whose location is not in question. Others are ancient cities lying beneath modern ones — Damascus, Tarsus, Athens, Rome — where the coordinate is a city centroid rather than a specific building, and no claim is made about the street Paul stood in. Others again are genuinely contested identifications. And some are not points at all: when the text names a province or a travel corridor, there is nothing to pin.

Collapsing those four into one dot would be the easy thing to do and would misrepresent three of them. So each place carries its own precision label, and the map shows the difference rather than flattening it.

## What a coordinate here does not claim

None of these coordinates identifies the house, the prison cell, the synagogue, the tribunal, or the exact step. Ancient sources rarely support that, and a map that implies it is inventing detail. The coordinate identifies the best-attested site, centroid, or route endpoint available, and the surrounding guide says which.

The shipwreck is the clearest case of restraint. Acts names the ports and the sequence of decisions with unusual precision, and then says only that the island was Malta. St Paul’s Bay is traditional, not demonstrated by the text, so the map labels Malta confidently and treats a specific bay or storm track as reconstruction.

## Why this is checkable

Every coordinate is published, with its precision label, in a downloadable dataset rather than only rendered as a picture. A reader who thinks Derbe is in the wrong place can see exactly what this project claims and on what basis, and disagree with something specific.

A coordinate can also be right and still be misleading if it is too precise for the claim around it. Where a stage happens at sea, or in a corridor, the anchor exists so the route can be drawn and is not presented as a place Paul stopped. Regional entries deserve a word, because they are the ones a map most wants to falsify. When Acts says Paul went through Syria and Cilicia strengthening the churches, or was kept from entering Bithynia, it names territory rather than a town. Giving those a dot would invent a stop that the text does not describe, so they are held as regions: the route passes through them, the timeline records them, and no pin claims a place Paul is not said to have stood.

That is the intent throughout. The value of the map is not that it is certainly right; it is that it shows its work well enough to be argued with.

## Common questions

### How accurate are the map locations?

As accurate as the identification behind each one, which is why the precision is recorded per place rather than implied by the dot. An excavated city is known to metres; a debated site is marked as debated; a region gets no false point. Nothing is sharpened for display.

### Do the coordinates mark the exact spot where an event happened?

No. A coordinate places the ancient settlement, usually its centre, not the room or roadside where a scene occurred. Where the text locates an event only near a place — the Damascus road is the clearest case — the map marks an approach point and labels it as such.

### Can I download the coordinates as data?

Yes. The chronology dataset publishes every place with its coordinates, precision, and confidence labels, and may be reused — including commercially — with attribution. Keep the labels when you copy it; stripping them turns a careful reconstruction into false certainty. The licence page records the terms.

---

Canonical: https://paulineletters.com/explore/methodology/coordinates