Common questions, answered briefly

Paul (originally Saul) was a first-century Jew from Tarsus in Cilicia who, after violently opposing the early Jesus movement, experienced a call near Damascus and became the foremost missionary to the gentile world. He wrote a large share of the New Testament letters. Read the full reference on the Apostle Paul.

Paul was born in Tarsus, in the region of Cilicia in what is now southern Turkiye, as Acts 22:3 states: "I am a Jew, born in Tarsus of Cilicia." Tarsus is named as his birthplace only in Acts; his own letters do not mention it. Learn more about why Tarsus matters.

Tarsus was a prosperous Roman provincial capital and a noted centre of learning, which Paul called "no mean city" (Acts 21:39). Being born there gave him fluent Greek, a cosmopolitan formation, and — with his inherited Roman citizenship — the standing and mobility his mission would rely on. See where Tarsus is.

Yes. Acts reports that Paul held Roman citizenship from birth (Acts 22:25–28) and that he invoked it to avoid a flogging and to appeal to Caesar (Acts 25:11). How his family acquired it is not recorded; most scholars accept the claim as historically plausible. (Scripture / Scholarship)

Yes. Tarsus is a living Turkish town in Mersin Province, and its Pauline sites are open to visitors. St Paul's Church operates as a state monumental museum where services for pilgrim groups are accommodated, and St Paul's Well and Cleopatra's Gate stand nearby. Access details change, so confirm locally before travel.

Pilgrims typically reach Tarsus by air via the Adana–Mersin region, then by road, as the town sits on the main highway between Mersin and Adana. Under Turkish law an organised visit uses a licensed guide and a licensed driver on licensed tourism vehicles. See the programme for how St Paul Global Week is arranged.

It is the joint feast of the two apostles kept on 29 June, ranked in the Catholic calendar as a Solemnity — the highest rank of feast. It is of ancient origin, documented in the Roman calendar of AD 354, and honours Peter and Paul together as the twin pillars of the Church of Rome. Read about the Feast of St Paul.

St Paul Global Week is a faith-tourism gathering in Tarsus and Mersin on 28–30 June 2027, held around the 29 June Solemnity in the birthplace of the Apostle Paul, and organised by Funny Tourism. The Feast Day prayer programme is broadcast live worldwide. Explore the programme.

The well itself is genuine and ancient: it is a working water source of considerable depth in the old quarter of Tarsus, and excavation around it has revealed Roman-period remains. Its identification with the courtyard of Paul's family home, however, rests on long-standing local veneration (Tradition) and has not been verified archaeologically (Scholarship). Visitors can nonetheless draw water from a shaft that has served the city since antiquity, in a district Paul would have known. See St Paul's Well for its history and setting.

The most prominent survival is the so-called Cleopatra's Gate, a Roman-era city gate later linked by name to the queen's famous arrival at Tarsus in 41 BC (Tradition, resting on ancient accounts of the meeting). Excavations in the city centre have also uncovered a stretch of paved Roman street with colonnade bases and drainage, giving a rare view of the urban fabric Paul walked as a young man, and a Roman road survives in the countryside north of the city. An overview of these monuments is given at Roman Tarsus.

Cilicia was the ancient region occupying the south-eastern Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor, in what is now southern Türkiye, bounded by the Taurus Mountains to the north and the sea to the south. Its fertile eastern plain, watered by rivers including the Cydnus, had Tarsus as its principal city, and under Rome the area was governed within the provincial system of the eastern empire. Paul identified himself as 'of Tarsus in Cilicia' (Acts 21:39), and the region appears repeatedly in the account of the early church (Acts 15:41). The region's geography and history are treated at Cilicia.

Ancient writers described Tarsus as a centre of learning whose enthusiasm for philosophy and rhetoric rivalled that of Athens and Alexandria (Scholarship, following ancient geographical accounts). The city was also known for weaving cilicium, a durable goat-hair cloth named after the region and used for tents — a trade often connected with Paul's own craft of tentmaking (Acts 18:3). Its position on the navigable Cydnus river, with a port linking the fertile Cilician plain to Mediterranean commerce, made it a prosperous provincial capital. The city's ancient reputation is explored further at Tarsus.

Yes. When his 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, Scripture). He remained in his home region for a period often called the 'silent years' — commonly estimated at several years, c. AD 36-45, since the narrative of Acts passes over them (Scholarship) — until Barnabas came to Tarsus to seek him and brought him to Antioch (Acts 11:25-26). What these hidden years in Cilicia may have involved is discussed in the article on St Paul.

The Cilician Gates are a narrow pass through the Taurus Mountains north of Tarsus, today known as the Gülek Pass, which for millennia served as the principal land route between the Anatolian plateau and the Cilician plain. Armies and travellers from the Hittite era through Alexander the Great and the Roman period funnelled through this defile, making Tarsus the gateway city at its southern end. Paul most likely travelled this route when he passed overland 'through Syria and Cilicia, confirming the churches' at the start of his second journey (Acts 15:41; the route is a scholarly inference, as Acts does not name the pass). The pass is described in the article on Cilicia.

On the first journey, c. AD 46-49, Paul and Barnabas sailed from Seleucia to Cyprus, preaching at Salamis and Paphos (Acts 13:4-12), then crossed to Asia Minor and worked in Pisidian Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe (Acts 13:13-14:23). Later journeys carried Paul through Cilicia and across the Aegean world to cities including Philippi, Thessalonica, Athens, Corinth and Ephesus, and the narrative of Acts closes with his arrival in Rome (Acts 28:14-16). A stage-by-stage account of the first circuit begins at Paul's first missionary journey.