What happened in the riot at Ephesus?

A city and its goddess

Ephesus, near today’s Selçuk on Turkey’s Aegean coast, was the capital of the Roman province of Asia. Its pride was the temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. After a man named Herostratus burned an earlier temple in 356 BC to make himself famous, the Ephesians rebuilt it grander still. Their Artemis was not the slim huntress of Greek art. Her statues stand stiff and crowned, with rows of rounded shapes across the chest, read as breasts, eggs or other signs of fertility, and the city claimed its sacred image had fallen from the sky.

Paul spent two to three years there, teaching daily in the lecture hall of Tyrannus (Acts 19:9–10). Converts burned their books of magic in public, worth fifty thousand pieces of silver (19:19).

Demetrius makes a speech

Demetrius made silver shrines of Artemis, small models sold to pilgrims, and he kept many craftsmen busy (19:24). He called the trade together and spoke to their purses first.

You see and hear that not at Ephesus alone, but almost throughout all Asia, this Paul has persuaded and turned away many people, saying that they are no gods that are made with hands.

Their business might lose its good name, he went on, and the temple of the great goddess might count for nothing. The guild answered with the city’s cry: “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!” (19:28).

Two hours in the theater

The whole city filled with confusion. The crowd grabbed Gaius and Aristarchus, Paul’s traveling companions from Macedonia, and rushed into the theater (19:29). Paul wanted to go in and face them. The disciples would not let him, and some of the Asiarchs, leading men of the province who were his friends, sent word begging him to stay away (19:30–31).

Luke tells the rest with a straight face: “Some therefore cried one thing, and some another, for the assembly was in confusion. Most of them didn’t know why they had come together” (19:32). Some Jews pushed forward a man named Alexander to speak, perhaps to show they were not Paul’s party. The crowd saw he was a Jew and drowned him out.

But when they perceived that he was a Jew, all with one voice for a time of about two hours cried out, “Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!”

That theater still stands on the slope of Mount Pion. It held about 25,000 people, and visitors climb the same tiers today.

The town clerk steps in

The town clerk, the city’s chief official, ended it (19:35–40). Everyone knows, he said, that Ephesus is the temple keeper of Artemis, so calm down. These men have robbed no temple and insulted no goddess. If Demetrius has a complaint, the courts are open and there are proconsuls; anything else belongs to the lawful assembly. Then the real worry: Rome might charge the city with rioting. With that, “he dismissed the assembly” (19:41).

A small detail: the Greek word Luke uses for this crowd, ekklesia, is the word he uses for the church. One assembly shouting for Artemis, another meeting in Jesus’s name, in the same city.

What came after

When the uproar ended, Paul said goodbye and left for Macedonia (20:1). His letters hint that Ephesus was harder than Acts tells. “A great and effective door has opened to me, and there are many adversaries,” he wrote from there (1 Corinthians 16:9). He also recalls trouble in Asia so heavy “that we despaired even of life” (2 Corinthians 1:8). Whether he meant the riot, scholars still debate.

The King James Version of 1611 gives the goddess her Roman name: “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” Of her temple, only foundations and one re-erected column remain in a marshy field near Selçuk. John Turtle Wood found the site in 1869, and a carved column drum from it is in the British Museum.