Transcription
This is Dr. Krauss. I'd like to just offer a brief video for you on some of the facts about ancient Corinth.
So, this is the city in, uh, ancient Greece that Paul writes the letters First and Second Corinthians to the church in Corinth. Location-wise, Corinth is situated on this very narrow isthmus of Corinth, just about four miles wide, that separates the the main part of Greece from what we call the Peloponnesian Peninsula. And so if you wanted to go from Athens down to Sparta, which is in the Peloponnesian Peninsula, you would have to go through the the Corinthian isthmus, this very narrow piece of land.
And it, it was a, a challenge in the ancient world, and we'll watch a little video later about this because they knew that the the best way to travel in the ancient world, the safest way, was by sea and the most efficient way. But to get from the Aegean Sea, uh, to the east over to the Corinthian Gulf and from there to Rome or to Sicily, which would be a pretty easy trip, you had to go all the way around the Peloponnesian Peninsula, which was several hundred miles. And so, how could we get across the the little strip of land here? And the trade that built up around that contributed to the city of Corinth. This is why it was a big city because there was, it's kind of like the Panama Canal.
So, you can see here a closeup of this, the little isthmus of Corinth and how narrow it is here. The city in this, uh, little slide shows you, uh, where it was until 1858, and then I think it was kind of destroyed by an earthquake and they moved it over closer to the coast, uh, the Gulf of Corinth. But there's a, there was a railway sort of that was built here called the Diolkos that where they would lift ships out of the water and drag them across these four miles and then put them in on the other side. And of course, they didn't do this for free. So, it employed a lot of people. They charged a fee. And this is what made Corinth a great city.
This is an artist's rendition of maybe what a, a villa would have looked like in the city of Corinth. It would have been a fairly wealthy person's home, but maybe the kind of area that Paul might have lived in where you again, you've got this Mediterranean kind of outdoor culture and, um, they don't do things inside as much as they do them outside because the weather is pleasant most of the year round.
This Lechaion Road or Lechaion Road, the the major road, the Cardo Maximus, the the central road, main street that went down in ancient Corinth. This is the, the ruins of ancient Corinth are very accessible. You can go there as a tourist. And some of these pictures I'm going to show you are from when I was there. Um, and my own personal pictures. So, this road went from the coast all the way through the city and was about 25 feet wide, paved with limestone, shops and stuff on each side. Pretty, pretty grand and, uh, pretty elaborate.
You can see again in the back, the the kind of, uh, back there, the small mountain is what they called the Acrocorinth, meaning the high place of Corinth. And the Acrocorinth would be at the top of that. They would have some, uh, temples to their Greek gods and it was, um, also some fortifications. So this was very important to them both from prestige and also as part of their religious practices.
This wall that you see here, this is a picture I took when I was in Corinth many years ago. Uh, in front of the wall is a, a bench that's called the the bema, the judgment seat. And when in Acts chapter 18, there's a story of a trial of Paul and the Christians in, and the, uh, proconsul of Corinth comes out and renders judgment. This is where he would have sat on this very place in this, uh, this ruin. It probably has not changed all that much since the first century.
It's a picture of the entrance up to the Acrocorinth. It was fortified. This is after the time of Paul, but you can see pilgrims would go up there. They would have festivals up there. And then an inscription on a, a piece of stone that was found in the ruins of Corinth. And this is in Greek, but it's the end of the word synagogue. And then you can kind of see the H E B and then the letter Rho, which is like the letter of, uh, our letter R. Hebrews, the synagogue of the Hebrews. So this is a stone that was probably the lintel, meaning over the doorpost or the doorway into their synagogue. And this would have been the synagogue in Corinth, probably from the time of Paul. So probably where Paul had visited. So incredible little piece of, uh, evidence from the ancient world.
One of the very beautiful ruins in ancient Corinth now, if you go visit it, is that of the Temple of Apollo, which was built about 550 BC and it still has these big massive columns and these guys are about 20, 25 feet high. Most of the temple has collapsed, but surely this was a beautiful temple at the time. You see the Acrocorinth in the back.
And this is a picture. This is a picture I took at the Temple of Apollo just laying down on my back and looking straight up, pointing my camera straight up. I noticed after I did this that a bunch of other people did it, too. So, I had an idea, I guess, that was, uh, helpful.
And then you get, um, this inscription from Erastus, who is mentioned in the book of Romans as, uh, one of the people apparently in Corinth. So this is probably the actual person and it, this says that he built the street. So he was, uh, a government official perhaps, but, uh, probably the same guy that Paul mentions in Romans 16.
So, a little bit more on this Diolkos, the, uh, ancient roadway and that led from the Aegean Sea to the Gulf of Corinth. And you can see some of the ruins of it here, the, uh, paving that went on. And so now there's a canal and it's a brutal, I mean, just straight across canal, no locks or anything like in the Panama Canal that goes from one side to the other. But they didn't have the technology to dig that kind of canal in the ancient world. So they did this roadway instead.
So I want to end this with just a brief little video for you. And it's kind of rough, but bear with me in this video because it will show you how this worked. It's really quite fascinating. Far more advanced than we originally thought. The quest for automatic transport is not merely a modern-day reality. The fact is that it was very much on the minds of the ancients. Two and a half thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks were at the pinnacle of their powers. Their ideas, goods, language, and culture dominated everywhere, from ancient Carthage in the west to modern Turkey in the east. Yet, in the heart of the Greek civilization lay a seemingly intractable problem. How could they avoid the need to travel hundreds of miles at sea to get to a place just four miles away by land? Let's say you were traveling from Athens to Sicily. You had to take your ship all the way around the outside of the Peloponnese. And when you've got a combination of currents, winds against you and 200 meter high cliffs. Uh, it's an ideal situation for pirates who lived down in the peninsulas there to row out, throw your sailors overboard and take over the ship. So it was a, it was a hazardous business taking our ship around rather than over. This navigation nightmare inspired the Greeks to set out on an epic building project in the 19th century. Today, we see the fruits of their labors in one of the wonders of modern Greece, the Corinth Canal. Cut deep into the steep cliffs and around 25 yards wide, the canal is a triumph of industrial age engineering. But it was completed in 1893, over two millennia too late for the ancient Greeks. So how did the ancient Greek engineers really overcome what seemed like an impossible challenge? The first person to have the idea of transporting ships over the Diolkos was, uh, probably the tyrant Periander in the 6th century BCE. Um, and he realized that by building a roadway, uh, he could reduce the friction for haulage across from one side to the other. We now believe that this simple limestone runway holds the key to discovering the Greeks' ingenious solution. The ancient Greeks would have used one of the first mega movers in history, an ancient crane to raise the super ships out of the water. Using a sophisticated system of pulleys, the vessels were hauled onto trolleys through the brute force of hordes of slaves and oxmen with the pre-cut grooves guiding the trolleys. This was the ancient world's first railroad. I'm not talking about a truck that is, uh, only two axles with a total of four wheels, but I imagine something with multiple axles with multiple wheels. And as you make up, uh, your way across the Diolkos, you have to keep the wheels of the trolley very strictly on course with these grooves. Otherwise, you could get into all kinds of trouble, uh, as you pull the ship over. For over 1,300 years, the Diolkos railway powered the trading empire of the central Mediterranean. Yet, it remains one of history's great lost opportunities. [Music]
So, that's just a, a clip of a video from, uh, something I recorded off History Channel. But you, you see how that worked a little bit and you think, "Wow, that's a lot of work and might take all day to haul a ship across." Well, even if it did take all day and you had to pay, um, many pieces of silver to do it to the people that owned the rights to the Diolkos, it still was a lot safer and a lot cheaper than going all the way around that Peloponnesian Peninsula, which maybe would have taken a couple of weeks. And this just contributed to the strategic importance of Corinth. It made it a seaport city, very cosmopolitan, meaning people from all over the the world. And it's kind of a, a meeting place of people from the East, meaning from, uh, what's Asia and even Palestine and going further all the way to Babylon that are coming through, and people from the West, meaning Rome and Europe and, uh, what's now France. So you can see that Corinth was a strategic city. It was a wealthy city. It, uh, needed a lot of slaves to do this. So, there were probably a lot of slaves in the city. And this was the city of Paul's day.
So, thank you very much and hope you enjoyed that video.