Acts 18:1-11

5. The Fourth Church in Europe Founded Corinth , Acts 18:1-11 .

Rejected from Athens, the intellectual capital of Greece, the apostle seeks Corinth, her then political capital, the seat of the Roman proconsul of Achaia or Southern Greece. The isthmus upon which Corinth stands connects the Peloponnesus with the continent on a small scale, very much as Darien connects South America with North. Before entering Corinth the apostle’s eye would survey the tall citadel rock, called the Acro-Corinthus. [ Acron, summit, and polis, city; Acropolis, city-summit: Acro-Corinthus, Corinth-summit.] Upon this summit it was that the original town, called Ephyra, was built, in that twilight of antiquity before the age of Homer, when the first object in selecting a site would be inaccessibility to the attack of a warlike enemy. Standing upon its brow, the apostle would survey the city spread beneath, the ground gradually sloping to CENCHREA, her seaport, nine miles distant on the east, and Lecheum, the seaport about as many miles on the west. By Cenchrea Corinth had commanded a trade with the East, across the AEgean, from the time of the Phenicians to the apostle’s day. Through Lecheum she had sent forth colonies on the coast of Greece, whose reverence for her, as their mother city, had increased her political influence. Her great commerce acquired a boundless wealth. For her lawless commercial population she provided, by her magnificent temple of Venus, the ample means of licentiousness under the sanctions of religion. Such was the proverbial profligacy of the town, that the verb Κορινθιαζειν , to Corinthianize, was invented to express the unrestrained indulgence of licentiousness. Corinth had ever played an important political part among the republics of Greece; but it was not until the latest age, after the patriotic leadership of Athens and Sparta had long ceased, that she took the supremacy, heading the Achaean League against the Roman power. For this, when Rome conquered, she suffered the most terrible penalty. The Roman consul, Memmius, entirely destroyed the city, leaving the ground perfectly desolate upon which the city had stood; so it remained until Julius Cesar rebuilt it and repeopled it with a numerous colony of Roman veterans relieved from service. The remnant of the old inhabitants returned, and the city rose with a rapidity paralleled only by the growth of the towns of our American west. At the time of Paul’s visit it probably had scarce, from its crudeness of mixed population, recovered its ancient refinement, though it had its ancient vices. It was still largely Roman, and, from the advantages of commerce, in some degree Jewish. Near Corinth was the locality of the celebrated Isthmian games, from which Paul often drew illustrations of Christian combat.