How this Library is written

> Our aim is not to prove a doctrine. Our aim is to document the history, sources and traditions surrounding Biblical Tarsus and the Apostle Paul as clearly and transparently as possible.

A digital reference library about Biblical Tarsus, the Apostle Paul, and the origins of early Christianity. The Library is a structured reference work: a set of interlinked articles on the Apostle Paul, ancient Tarsus, Roman Cilicia, and the emergence of early Christianity, together with catalogues of primary sources, published scholarship, and a public-domain image archive. Every article is written to be cited: claims are labelled by register, dates are given as scholarly ranges, and sources are catalogued where a reader can inspect them.

The Library is not a blog, and its pages are not opinion pieces; articles are revised in place rather than superseded by newer posts. It is not a devotional site: it describes what Scripture records, what tradition holds, and what scholarship concludes, without asking the reader to hold any of these commitments. And it is not a travel brochure: pages such as the pilgrimage guide describe places — St. Paul's Well, Cleopatra's Gate, the Roman road — as a reference work describes them, not as a sales page presents them.

A reference work is defined as much by its refusals as by its contents. These are ours:

• We do not invent history. No artefact, inscription, provenance or source is fabricated or embellished. Where the record is silent, the page says so.
• We do not present tradition as established historical fact. A belief transmitted by later Christian memory is labelled (Tradition) and stays labelled, however venerable and however often repeated elsewhere.
• We distinguish evidence from interpretation. What a text says, what a stone shows, and what a scholar concludes from either are three different statements, and the register labels keep them apart.
• We update articles when better evidence becomes available. An entry is revised in place, and its modification date moves; it is not defended because we wrote it.

Three further refusals follow from the same principle: we do not fabricate or re-caption archive material — every image carries its institution, licence and original date; we do not sell anything on this site, and no entry is written to move a booking; and we do not name a scholar as a reviewer, contributor or endorser without their written consent.

Writing about Paul of Tarsus means writing across three kinds of evidence that carry different weights and answer to different tests. The New Testament narrative, above all the Acts of the Apostles, is a literary source with its own purposes; even its date of composition is a matter of scholarly debate, with most estimates falling between c. AD 80–90 and a minority position placing it in the early second century (Scholarship). Later Christian tradition preserves memories, identifications, and devotional practices that may be centuries younger than the events they describe. Modern historical, archaeological, and textual scholarship evaluates both, and often expresses its conclusions as probabilities and ranges rather than certainties. A reference work that blends these three voices without marking the seams misleads its readers.

The Library therefore labels claims wherever a reader could mistake the register. A statement followed by (Scripture) reports what the biblical text itself says, cited by book, chapter, and verse; it is a claim about the text, not an independent historical verdict. A statement followed by (Tradition) reports a belief or identification transmitted by later Christian communities. A statement followed by (Scholarship) reports a conclusion or consensus of modern academic study, catalogued on the scholarship page. Plain unlabelled statements are matters of ordinary historical record on which the registers do not diverge.

• (Scripture) — a claim made by the biblical text itself. Example: Paul states that he was "born in Tarsus of Cilicia" and brought up in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3) (Scripture).
• (Tradition) — a claim transmitted by later Christian memory and practice. Example: the well in the old quarter of Tarsus known as St. Paul's Well is traditionally identified with the site of Paul's family home (Tradition); the identification is devotional, not archaeologically demonstrated.
• (Scholarship) — a conclusion of modern academic study. Example: Paul's first missionary journey through Cyprus and southern Asia Minor is commonly dated to c. AD 46–48 (Scholarship); like most Pauline dates, this is a reasoned range, not a fixed point.

The Library works from primary sources first. The texts on which any claim ultimately rests — the New Testament writings, and the Greek and Roman authors who describe Tarsus and Cilicia — are catalogued on the sources page, so that a reader can trace a statement back to the document it comes from. Scripture is cited by book, chapter, and verse (for example, Acts 13:4-12 for the events on Cyprus involving Barnabas and Sergius Paulus); where a biblical passage is quoted rather than summarised, the Library quotes public-domain translations only, and sparingly. Secondary claims are grounded in peer-reviewed and institutional scholarship, catalogued with full bibliographic detail on the scholarship page; scholar names and citations live there, not in article prose.

The image archive holds public-domain material only — engravings, early photographs, maps, and plates — each item carrying its provenance: where it comes from, when it was made, and why it is free to reuse. The Library publishes no fabricated artifacts: no invented inscriptions, no imagined reconstructions presented as records, no image passed off as older or more authoritative than it is. Dates from Paul's era are given as scholarly ranges or with "c." (circa), because that is how the evidence supports them; a page that states a precise year where scholarship offers a range has failed its own standard.

Before publication, every page is checked against the published scholarship catalogued in the Library's bibliography. The check runs across the three fields the subject demands: History (chronology, the Roman provincial setting of Roman Tarsus, prosopography), Archaeology (sites, monuments, material culture, and the limits of what excavation has and has not shown), and Theology (the content of the texts, their interpretation, and the traditions built upon them). A claim that cannot be matched to a catalogued source in the relevant field is either relabelled to its correct register, qualified, or removed.

The Library also invites review by academic specialists in these three fields. Named academic reviewers are credited on this page only with their written consent; no reviewer is named, and no page claims a reviewer's endorsement, unless that consent exists in writing. Until such credits appear here, readers should understand the review standard as the documentary check described above, applied to every page against the catalogued bibliography.

The Library corrects errors in place: when a factual mistake, a mislabelled register, or an unsupported date is identified, the page itself is amended and its dateModified is updated, so that the current version of a page is always its best version. Corrections and documented challenges to any claim may be sent through the organiser, Funny Tourism; substantiated corrections are applied to the page, and a claim that cannot be defended against the catalogued sources is revised or withdrawn.

The Library is written and maintained by the TarsusGospel editorial team, and published by Funny Tourism — the trading brand of DYF Turizm Ticaret Limited Sirketi, a licensed Turkish travel agency based in Istanbul. Every entry carries `TarsusGospel` as its author and a modification date. The team writes to the standards set out on this page rather than under individual bylines, because a reference work should be judged by the sources it can show, not by the names it can print.

Editorial responsibility sits with the publisher. The Library carries no advertising, no sponsored entries and no paid placement, and nothing on this site is for sale. St Paul Global Week — the annual gathering in Tarsus — is organised by the same company, and the Library links to it; but the two are kept editorially separate. No page here is written in order to sell a journey, and no entry has been shortened, softened or shaped to suit a programme.

At present the Library has no external academic contributors, and no scholar has reviewed it in a named capacity. Saying so plainly matters more than the appearance of endorsement.

What the Library does have is a documented dependence on published scholarship. Every substantive claim is checked against the excavation reports, peer-reviewed articles, monographs and critical editions catalogued in the bibliography. The scholars and institutions named there are cited for their published work and nothing more: citation is not endorsement, and no one named in the bibliography is associated with this Library or has been asked to vouch for it.

Named academic contributors will appear in this section only once they have agreed in writing to be named publicly. When they do, this section will state exactly what each has reviewed — History, Archaeology or Theology — and when. Historians, archaeologists and scholars of early Christianity who would like to review a page, correct one, or contribute are welcome to write to the publisher, Funny Tourism.

A reference library of this kind is possible only because other institutions have made their work public. The Library acknowledges, with thanks:

• Natural Earth, for the public-domain coastline data drawn in the Biblical Atlas.
• The collections whose public-domain scans make the Digital Archive possible: the British Library; the Library of Congress, including the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection; the National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection; the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection; the Victoria and Albert Museum; and the Birmingham Museum of Art — much of it reached through Wikimedia Commons.
• The open-access publishers and repositories through which the scholarship behind these pages can actually be read: DergiPark, HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Tyndale Bulletin, OpenEdition, LacusCurtius at the University of Chicago, the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, and Kultur Envanteri.

Every item carries its own institution, licence and link on the page where it appears. These acknowledgements record where material came from; they do not imply that any institution named here endorses, or is associated with, this Library.