How this was decided
What is deliberately not on the map
A map is a set of claims, so what it declines to show is part of what it is saying.
Reader question
Why are some famous places missing from this map?
Because a map that shows everything with equal confidence would misrepresent the evidence. Contested identifications appear with their uncertainty marked rather than hidden, named landmarks appear only where a real source supports them, and places the text never locates are not given a spot merely because a reader expects one.
Contested identifications are shown as contested
Lystra, Derbe, and the route past Fair Havens are the best-known contested locations on Paul’s route. Each is shown, because leaving them out would break the journey, but each carries a visible label recording that the placement is debated. The reader gets the reconstruction and the caveat together rather than one without the other.
That is a different decision from silently picking the majority view. The majority view is used, but it is marked, so that someone who follows the alternative identification can see exactly which stretch of the route would move.
Landmarks need a source
The terrain carries named summits, and every one of them is a real, sourced mountain. Adding an invented peak to fill an empty stretch would be easy and unfalsifiable, and it would quietly turn the whole landscape into decoration.
Mount Sinai is the instructive omission. It is famous, it is mentioned in Galatians, and its location is genuinely disputed among several candidates. Rather than pick one and draw it, the map leaves it off. A named mountain on this map is a claim about geography, and that is not a claim this project can support for Sinai.
The empty space is doing work
The same restraint governs the storm. Acts gives the ports, the winds, and the sequence of shipboard decisions in remarkable detail, and then gives no track. The map shows progressive open-sea stages to convey duration, and declines to draw the precise path that would make it look like a GPS trace.
Provincial borders came off for the same reason. Roman administrative boundaries moved during Paul’s lifetime, they are not known to the precision a drawn line implies, and a crisp border on a map reads as a fact rather than as a scholarly estimate. Regions are named where the text names them and left unbounded, which is closer to what is actually known.
Hydrography got the same scrutiny. Lakes and rivers appear where they can be sourced, and inland water that cannot be placed with confidence is left off rather than sketched in to make a landscape look complete. An invented lake is as much a claim as an invented city, and it is much less likely to be noticed. Places without events are handled the same way. A port the ship called at, with nothing recorded but the calling, is drawn and labelled on the route but does not become a stop with a scene attached. Giving every named place equal narrative weight would turn the account into a travelogue and would imply that the sources say more about each of them than they do.
None of these omissions makes the map more accurate in the sense of containing more truth. They make it more honest in the sense of containing fewer claims that the sources cannot carry.
Common questions
Why is Mount Sinai not on the map?
Named summits appear only with a secure identification and a real source behind them, and the location of Sinai has been debated for centuries. Paul’s own reference places it “in Arabia” without a point, so the map shows Arabia as a region and declines to plant a flag the evidence cannot support.
Why is Spain not shown?
The letters attest the intention — Paul tells the Romans he hopes to go on to Spain — but no narrative records the journey. Whether he ever went rests on later tradition. The map draws only travel a source narrates, so Spain stays off the route rather than being drawn from a hope.
Will missing places be added later?
When evidence supports them, yes — with a source and a visible revision date, like every other claim. The empty space is load-bearing in the meantime: a map that fills its gaps for completeness stops showing the reader what is actually known.
Bibliography and sources
- The project’s 67-row chronology, cross-referencing Acts and the letters and labeling debated dates.
- Acts 7–28, World English Bible (public domain). View source
- Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 1996).