The fidelity of St. Luke's narrative in its politi- cal allusions and local colour has received confirma- tion from many sources. As the virtual capital of a senatorial province, Ephesus had its proconsuls {avdviraToi, Ac 19^^), but here the plural is merely used colloquially, without implying that there could ever be more than one at a time. As the head of a conventus iuridicns, Ephesus was an assize town, in which the judges were apparently sitting at the very time of the riot (v.**). Latin was the language of the courts, and dyopaioi dyovrai is the translation of conventns aguntur. As a free city of the Empire, Ephesus had still a semblance of ancient Ionic autonomy ; her att'airs were 'settled in a regular assembly' (v.^^), i.e. either at an ordinary meeting of the Demos held in the theatre on a fixed day, or at an extraordinary- meeting called by authority of the proconsul. Irregular meetings of the populace were sternly
f)rohibited (v.**) ; and, indeed, the powers of the awful assembly were more and more curtailed, till at last it practically had to content itself with registering the decrees of the Roman Senate. The proud claim of Ephesus to be the temple- warden {veijiK6pov, lit. ' temple-sweeper') of Artemis (v.**) is attested by inscriptions and coins (W. M. Ramsay, Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, 1895, i. 58 ; Letters to the Seven Churches, 232). The Asiarchs who be- friended St. Paul had no official connexion with tlie cult of Artemis; they were members of the Commune whose function it was to unite the Empire in a re- ligious devotion to Rome.
St. Paul's pathetic address at Miletus to the elders of Ephesus (Ac 20'*"^), in which he recalls the leading features of his strenuous mission in the city— his tears and trials (v.^*), his public and private teaching (v.*"), his incessant spiritual and manual toil (vv.^i-**)— and declares himself pure from the blood of all men (v.'"), presents as high
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an ideal of the ministerial vocation as has ever been conceived and recorded. There is no reason to doubt that it gives an approximate sumniarj- of his original words (cf. J. Mofiatt, LNT, p. 306).
With the religious history of Ephesus are also associated the names of Priscilla and Aquila (Ac W% Apollos {l8-\ 1 Co W-), Tychicus (Eph 6^^), Timothy (1 Ti P, 2 Ti i^), and especially John the Apostle and John the Presbj-ter. After the departure of St. Paul the Ephesian Church "was injured by the activity of false teachers (Ac 20-"- •*», Rev 2''), but the Fall of Jeru- salem greatly enhanced its importance, and the influence of the Johannine school made it the centre of Eastern Christianity. In tlie time of Domitian it liad the primacy among the Seven Churches of Asia (Rev 2^). The Letter to the Church of Ephesus is on the whole laudatory. The Christian community commanded the writer's respect by its keen scrutiny of soi-disant apostles, by its intolerance of evil, and its hatred of the libertinism which is the antithesis of legalism. But it had declined in the fervent love which alone made a Church truly lovable to the Apostle. A generation later, however, Ignatius in his Ep. to the Ephcsians uses the language of profound ad- miration :
' I ought to be trained for the contest by you in faith, in ad- monition, in endurance in lonp-suffering' (§ 3); 'for j-e all live according to the truth and no heresy hath a home among you ; nay, ye do not so much as listen to any one if he speak of aught else save concerning Jesus Christ in truth' (§ 6); 'you were ever of one mind with the Apostles in the power of Jesus Christ ' (§ 11).
Ephesus had a long line of bishops, and was the seat of the council which condemned the doctrine of Nestorius in A.D. 431. The ruins of the ancient city, on Coressus and Prion, are extensive and im- pressive. The theatre in which the riot (Ac 19) took place is remarkablj- well preserved, and in 1S70 the foundation of the Temple of Artemis was discovered by J. T. Wood. The modern village lying beside the temple bears the name of Ayaso- luk, which is a corrtiption of ayios dedXbyos, the title of St. John the Divine which was given to the Church of Justinian.
Literature. — W^. M. Ramsay, Letters to the Seven Churches, 1904 ; Murray's Handbook to Ana Minor, 1895 ; G. A. Zim- mermann, Ephesos iiii ersten christl. Jahrhvndcrt, 1874; art. ' Ephesus 'in Pauly-Wissowa, v. [1905] ; J. T. Wood, Discoveries at Ephesus, lb76; E. L. Hicks, Ancient Greek Inscriptions in the Drit. Museum, iii. 2 [1890]; D. G. Hogarth, Excavations in Ephesus : the Archaic Artemisia, 2 vols., 1908.
Alexander Souter and James Strahan.
EPICUREANS.— The Epicurean philosophers are mentioned only once in the NT, viz. in Ac 17'^ During his second missionary journey St. Paul met with them in Atliens. Though he stayed there not more than four weeks, the Apostle was deeply moved by tlie sight of so large a number of statues erected in honour of various deities. Not content with preaching in the synagogue to Jews and prose- lytes, he sought pagan hearers in their famous market-place, thus imitating Socrates 400 years before. The market-place was ' rich in noble statues, the central seat of commercial, forensic, and philosophic intercourse, as well as of the busy idleness of the loungers ' (Meyer, Coyn. on Acts, Eng. tr., 1877, ii. 108). As the 'Painted Porch' in which the Stoics taught was situated in the market-place, and the garden where the Epi- cureans gathered for their fraternal discussions was not far away, it is not surprising that some members of these two schools of philosophy were among the Apostle's listeners. Atiiens was the home and centre of the four great philosophies founded by Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and Epicurus. The two first, however, had at this time been supplanted by the two last ; thus, in encountering