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The Theatre and the Tomb: Reawakening Faith in Ephesus

  • Writer: Jack Rogers
    Jack Rogers
  • Apr 21
  • 4 min read

Cold, windy, and overcast. It was not how I pictured my lone walk through Ephesus in southern Turkey. I was there only because a friend told me to go. In January, the ancient city was a ghost town. No tourists, no buses, just me and the wild dogs that roamed the countryside. The city was a historical masterpiece, hardly touched since its abandonment a thousand years before. If I listened closely to the silence, I felt as though I could hear the voices of Romans and Greeks as I moved through the stone walkways. I marvelled at the Library of Celsus, the Roman competitor to the Egyptian Library of Alexandria, and I wondered what it must have been like to study within its walls back when it was the epicentre of public knowledge. Continuing through the site, I came upon the grandiose Greek and Roman theatre. It once held 24,000 seats, more than any theatre of today.

 

The Great Theatre of Ephesus in Turkey under a bright blue sky, with ancient stone seating carved into the hillside and crumbling columns lining the foreground.

It was also where the Apostle Paul nearly met his end during the aptly-named Riot at Ephesus. Paul arrived to the city and preached against Artemis, the Greek goddess whose grand temple was not far away. Fearing Paul's teachings in favour of Jesus would harm the silver trade, the Ephesians rioted, carried Paul to the theatre in which I stood, and demanded he be held accountable for his blasphemy. Paul lived, the city clerk having stepped in to quell the crowd by threatening charges of rioting, and continued preaching to the Ephesians, even writing to them from Roman prison.

 

I knew this story from Sunday School as a child, but I had long chalked it up to theological parable.  Standing in the great theatre, I could no longer ignore that the riot was real. What evidence did I have? Hardly any, but more than I had mere minutes before. I couldn't deny that I was standing in a real place that exactly fit Luke's description in the Book of Acts. Almost two thousand years later, it read like it was written yesterday. I was overcome with a sense of wonder, amazement, and a surge of excitement that I only felt when I encountered something I never expected to see.

 

As I walked away from the city, contemplating Paul's teaching in Ephesus, I passed the Temple of Artemis. It was long gone; only a single, reconstructed pillar remained. Over two thousand years of earthquakes, fires, and warfare had almost erased it from the earth. I found the parallel fitting to my recent discovery; the temple, like ancient Greek mythology, had been conquered by time, yet Christianity survived.

 

Continuing away from the temple, I came upon some ruins on a hill, unaware of their importance. Like the city of Ephesus, the large site was devoid of tourists in the damp of January. Some walls and columns remained, but it was difficult to make out what kind of place the ruins once were. That is, until I found the clean, polished stones and columns marking a place of importance amongst the brick. The headstone took my breath away: "St Jean In Mezari." The tomb of Saint John. The one whom Jesus loved, who was entrusted with caring for Mary after the Ascension, the author of Revelation, the only apostle to be assumed into heaven (at least according to some traditions). The Saint John.

 

Ruins of St. John’s Basilica in Selçuk, Turkey, featuring weathered marble columns and ancient stone walls, with puddles reflecting the cloudy sky and a medieval fortress visible in the background.

This was his church, once a pilgrimage site for Christians across the world. The altar sat atop the tomb, the cave John entered before, according to Christian tradition, being assumed into Heaven in a blinding light. The tomb was empty now, having been opened by Constantine in the 300s. No bones, no clothes, no relics. It was as though John had never been there in the first place.  But he had. He lived in Ephesus, and he wrote his three epistles there. Some accounts said he wrote the Gospel of John and part of the Book of Revelation there.

 

A rush of emotion overwhelmed me. I had seen where Paul nearly caused a riot, the Temple of Artemis which had failed to withstand time, and now the tomb of John the Evangelist. Just a day before, these were names, places, and events that I believed in, but had no basis for that belief outside of my upbringing. Now, they were as real to me as the pyramids in Egypt and the President of the United States. Standing before the tomb, I couldn't wait to go back to my room and read the Book of Acts and Ephesians. I rushed around the site, taking photos, visualising what worshipping there must have been like in the church's earliest days knowing that John's tomb was beneath the altar. It was a religious fervour I had never felt before, not even when I was baptised. My faith was no longer an abstract set of morals and ideas, but a concrete belief as immovable and unyielding as the great theatre just down the road.

 

But was it real? I didn't know if any of this was true, not for certain. What I did know for certain was that John was a real person who died in the 1st Century, and his tomb was opened in the 5th Century. His existence was as indisputable as the Pool of Siloam, where Jesus healed the blind man, and Nazareth, Jesus' earthly hometown. These places were once decried as fictional creations, but were unearthed by archaeologists in the 21st Century. If they could be confirmed two thousand years later, then I could easily accept that John lived, wrote, and died in Ephesus. Without his relics, it was easier still to believe he was assumed into heaven. Just as Jesus and Mary before him. Can I ever be absolutely certain? No, no one can, not with our earthly knowledge, but standing amongst the ruins of empires gone by, I couldn’t dismiss the Biblical accounts that took place beneath my feet. Faith is grounded in belief, not proof. For the first time, the two aligned to paint the same picture. For me, that was more than enough.

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