How this was decided
Which road did Paul take?
Between two named cities there is usually one plausible corridor, and saying which one is a claim worth making explicitly.
Reader question
Which route did Paul actually walk between cities?
Where Acts names intermediate places, those. Where it does not, the corridor the terrain permits: mountain ranges have few crossings, and the Roman network followed them. The map threads named passes such as the Cilician Gates and the crossing of the Amanus rather than drawing a straight line through a mountainside.
Straight lines are the wrong default
Joining two cities with a straight line is easy and almost always wrong. Southern Asia Minor is not flat, the Amanus and Taurus ranges stand between Syria and the Anatolian plateau, and a traveller crossed them at a small number of known points or not at all.
So an overland leg here follows a corridor rather than a chord. Antioch to Tarsus goes over the Amanus and then along the coastal plain; the plateau is reached through the Cilician Gates. These are not decorative flourishes — they are the difference between a route a person could walk and a line drawn on a picture.
What Acts supplies and what it leaves out
Sometimes the text names the intermediate stops, and then there is nothing to infer: the sequence through Amphipolis and Apollonia to Thessalonica is given. Sometimes it names only endpoints and a region, as with the strengthening of the churches through Galatia and Phrygia, and the specific road is not recoverable.
Where a place is passed through without an event, it appears as a labelled point on the route rather than as a stop with a story attached. A place earns a chapter by being where something happens, not by being on the way — otherwise the narrative would fragment into a travelogue.
Marking the difference
The important part is not which corridor is chosen but that the choice is visible. Where Acts states the road, the guides say so. Where the road is an inference from terrain and the Roman network, they say that too, and the inference is stated as an inference.
Perga to Pisidian Antioch is the case that repays attention. Acts gives both cities and nothing between, but the two sit at very different elevations: the route climbs from the coastal plain into the Anatolian highlands through the Taurus range, a hard ascent through country the ancient sources describe as dangerous. Some readers connect it to the illness Paul mentions in Galatians, and to John Mark turning back at Perga. The map shows the climb; the guides decline to assert the connection.
Sea legs get the same treatment in reverse. A voyage between two ports is drawn as a real crossing rather than a straight chord, because a chord between distant harbours will run over headlands and islands that a ship had to round. Where a passage needed threading — north of Rhodes, off Cnidus, around the eastern cape of Crete — the waypoints are placed so the drawn track stays in water a vessel could actually use.
That distinction also keeps the narration honest. A leg that is reconstructed is drawn on the map, because Paul crossed the ground somehow, but it is not narrated as though the sources described the journey. Showing a crossing and claiming a journey are different acts.
Common questions
Did Paul use Roman roads?
Where the network existed, almost certainly. Acts names Amphipolis and Apollonia on the walk from Philippi to Thessalonica — the towns a traveller on the Via Egnatia would pass through in exactly that order. The narrative rarely names a road, but it keeps naming the places the roads went through.
How do we know which mountain passes existed in Paul’s day?
The great passes are geological constants — the Cilician Gates have carried the road from Tarsus up to the plateau since long before Rome, and ancient sources name them. Terrain admits few alternatives, so the map threads passes that are attested and walkable rather than inventing a crossing where none exists.
Could Paul have taken a different road?
Sometimes, yes. Where two corridors are both plausible, the route notes say which one was drawn and why, and the drawn line claims a corridor rather than a certainty. A leg Acts does not describe is labeled reconstruction, and a better argument for the other road is exactly the kind of correction the revision policy invites.
Bibliography and sources
- Acts 7–28, World English Bible (public domain). View source
- The project’s 67-row chronology, cross-referencing Acts and the letters and labeling debated dates.
- Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, Paul: A Critical Life (Oxford University Press, 1996).