Caesarea Maritima: Herod's Harbour City Where Paul Was Imprisoned Two Years

Caesarea Maritima — "Caesarea by the Sea" — was the great harbour city of Herod and the Roman administrative capital of Judaea. In the Acts of the Apostles it appears at nearly every turning point of the early church: the baptism of the first Gentile household, the home of Philip the Evangelist, the two-year imprisonment of Paul and his hearings before Felix, Festus and Agrippa, and finally the quay from which the apostle sailed for Rome. It is also, less famously, the port through which the newly converted Saul was sent home to Tarsus — making Caesarea the hinge between his Damascus road and his Cilician years.

The Ancient City

Caesarea was a deliberate creation. On the site of a modest Phoenician anchorage called Strato's Tower, Herod the Great built an entirely new city between c. 22 and c. 10/9 BC and named it for his patron, the emperor Caesar Augustus. Its centrepiece was the harbour Sebastos ("Augustus" in Greek), one of the most ambitious engineering works of the ancient Mediterranean: enormous breakwaters were sunk into the open sea using hydraulic concrete that set underwater, creating a sheltered all-weather port on a coastline that had no natural bay (Scholarship). Josephus, writing in the first century, describes the harbour as rivalling Piraeus, with a temple of Rome and Augustus rising above the quays.

Herod equipped the city with a theatre facing the sea, a hippodrome for races, a promontory palace built out over the waves, an aqueduct carrying spring water from the flanks of Mount Carmel, and a grid of streets, warehouses and public buildings. After Judaea came under direct Roman rule in AD 6, Caesarea — not Jerusalem — became the seat of the Roman governors. The prefects and procurators resided here and went up to Jerusalem chiefly for the festivals. Pontius Pilate, prefect c. AD 26–36, governed from Caesarea; a re-used building stone found in the theatre in 1961 bears his name and title in Latin and remains the only monumental stone inscription of Pilate ever discovered (Scholarship).

The city's mixed Greek and Jewish population made it a persistent flashpoint, and disturbances at Caesarea in AD 66 helped ignite the great Jewish revolt. It was at Caesarea that Vespasian's troops acclaimed him emperor in AD 69 (Scholarship). In later centuries Caesarea became a leading Christian intellectual centre: Origen taught here and assembled his famous library in the third century, and Eusebius, the first great church historian, served as its bishop in the early fourth century (Scholarship).

Paul at Caesarea (Acts)

Caesarea threads through Acts from beginning to end. Philip the Evangelist, one of the seven, preached up the coast "till he came to Caesarea" (Acts 8:40) and settled there. Peter came to the city at the summons of Cornelius, "a centurion of that which is called the Italian band" (Acts 10:1), and in Cornelius's house the Holy Spirit fell upon Gentile hearers, who were then baptised (Acts 10:44-48) (Scripture). The episode — defended by Peter before the church in Jerusalem in Acts 11:1-18 — marked the decisive opening of the gospel to the nations, in the very city that embodied Roman power in Judaea.

For this library, one Caesarea verse matters above all. When the newly converted Saul's preaching in Jerusalem provoked a plot against his life, "the brethren... brought him down to Caesarea, and sent him away to Tarsus" (Acts 9:30, Douay-Rheims) (Scripture). Caesarea was thus the door through which Paul returned to Cilicia and his native Tarsus for the quiet years before Barnabas sought him out — a journey generally understood to have been made by sea, from Herod's harbour city to the coast below the Cilician plain (Scholarship).

Paul passed through Caesarea again at the close of his second missionary journey, landing there before going up to greet the church and travelling on to Antioch (Acts 18:22). At the end of the third journey, returning from Miletus and the Aegean, he stayed "in the house of Philip the evangelist, who was one of the seven," whose four daughters prophesied (Acts 21:8-9); there the prophet Agabus bound his own hands and feet with Paul's girdle and foretold the apostle's arrest in Jerusalem (Acts 21:10-11) (Scripture).

The prophecy held. After Paul's arrest in Jerusalem and the discovery of a plot against him, the Roman tribune sent him under heavy escort by night to Caesarea, to the governor Felix, who commanded him "to be kept in Herod's judgment hall" (Acts 23:35, Douay-Rheims) — the praetorium, generally identified with Herod's promontory palace (Scholarship). There Paul answered the accusations of the high priest's party before Felix (Acts 24:1-27), who, hoping for a bribe and wishing to please the Jewish leadership, left him in custody. "But when two years were ended, Felix had for successor Portius Festus" (Acts 24:27) (Scripture). This Caesarean imprisonment is commonly dated c. AD 57–59 (Scholarship).

Before the new governor Festus, Paul made the appeal that determined the rest of his story: "I appeal to Caesar" (Acts 25:11, Douay-Rheims) (Scripture). Shortly afterwards, King Agrippa II and Bernice arrived at Caesarea, and Paul delivered before them his great apologia — recounting his upbringing, his persecution of the church, and the vision on the Damascus road (Acts 26:1-32). Agrippa's verdict was that the prisoner "might have been set at liberty, if he had not appealed to Caesar" (Acts 26:32) (Scripture).

From Caesarea's harbour, then, began the voyage to Rome: Paul and other prisoners were delivered to the centurion Julius and boarded a ship of Adramyttium (Acts 27:1-2). The vessel coasted north to Sidon and then sailed "over the sea of Cilicia and Pamphylia" (Acts 27:5) — passing through the waters off Tarsus's own shore — before the transfer to an Alexandrian grain ship, the storm, and the wreck at Malta. The first-person narrator of the "we" passages was aboard from Caesarea onward (Acts 27:1-2) (Scripture); this companion has been identified since the early church as Luke (Tradition).

What Remains Today

Caesarea is among the most extensively excavated Roman cities of the eastern Mediterranean, preserved within the Caesarea National Park on Israel's coast. The Herodian theatre, heavily restored, still faces the sea at the southern end of the site. Just north of it, on a low promontory washed by the waves, lie the foundations of the promontory palace — the probable praetorium of Acts 23:35, and therefore the most likely setting of Paul's imprisonment and hearings (Scholarship). The outline of the hippodrome, later converted to an amphitheatre, runs along the shore nearby.

Of Herod's harbour Sebastos, the breakwaters now lie largely submerged; their concrete cores have been mapped by underwater archaeology and can be traced beneath the modern anchorage (Scholarship). The Crusader town, fortified in the thirteenth century with walls, gates and a moat that still stand to impressive height, occupies the heart of the ancient city. A replica of the Pilate inscription is displayed on site; the original stone is kept in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem (Scholarship). North of the walls, the high arches of the Roman aqueduct stride along the beach — one of the most photographed Roman monuments in the country. Byzantine streets, a governor's archive complex, mosaics and warehouse vaults round out a site that spans a millennium of occupation.

Visiting Caesarea in Context

Caesarea lies on the Mediterranean coast of Israel, roughly midway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and is easily reached by road; the national park is open year-round, with the harbour area, theatre and aqueduct beach each accessible on foot. For the visitor tracing Paul's footsteps, the promontory palace and theatre give the clearest sense of the two years the apostle spent here awaiting justice, and the view west from the harbour marks the beginning of the sea road to Rome.

Within the wider geography of Paul's life, Caesarea is best read together with its counterparts: Jerusalem, the city of his arrest; Rome, the city of his appeal; and Tarsus, the city of his birth, to which Caesarea first sent him home (Acts 9:30). Pilgrims who begin with the apostle's origins in Cilicia — at St. Paul's Well in Tarsus — will find in Caesarea the other end of that first journey home, and a fitting station on any longer pilgrimage itinerary through the lands of Acts.