Roads, ships, and letters

For roughly twenty years Paul travels the Roman world — three long journeys, thousands of miles on foot and by ship. He starts in synagogues, argues in marketplaces, and in Athens debates philosophers, quoting their own poets and pointing at an altar inscribed to an unknown god. He plants small congregations in port cities and then writes to them: letters about unity, money, sex, grief, food offered to idols, and how to treat each other, which became a third of the New Testament. His own summary of the cost is a list — shipwrecks, beatings, hunger, a night and a day in the open sea, and the daily pressure of anxiety for all the churches. Saying goodbye to the Ephesian elders, he tells them he does not count his life of any value to himself, if only he may finish his course.