place of Jewish communities in Christian missionary strategies
must have declined. The reasons for this are simply numerical:
the Jews accounted for only a small proportion of the empire’s
whole population, and many Jews refused to convert. If Chris-
tianity was to grow, then it would need to take its missionary effort
to the gentiles/pagans (K. Hopkins 1998: 216). Indeed, it is clear
that the presence of Jewish communities cannot be invoked every-
where to explain the arrival some time later of Christianity: for
example, there seems to have been no Jewish community in
Carthage before Christianity arrived there, already by the second
century (Rives 1995: 226).
What other missionary strategies can be deduced from the
New Testament accounts of Paul? One, clearly, is that his mission
was primarily urban: it is not for nothing that Wayne Meeks
summed him up in the phrase ‘Paul was a city person’ (Meeks
1983: 9). The reason for this urban focus was, presumably, that
cities provided opportunities for the communication of the gospel
to the widest possible audience since it was there that large gath-
erings of people could be found. Hence it is no surprise to find
Paul preaching in the agora (market place) in Athens (Acts17.17).
Not all cities could offer equal opportunities, since the profile of
their populations would have differed (as we noted in connection
with the marginality of the Jewish population at Philippi). The
cities that would have offered the best scope for spreading the
Christian message were those that boasted not only a large local
population, but also a multitude of transients who might then take
the message elsewhere. That such considerations might have
influenced Paul can be glimpsed in his use of Ephesus as a base
for operations for over two years, ‘so that all the residents of
Asia, both Greeks and Jews, heard the world of the Lord’ (Acts
19.8–10). This last remark might look like exaggeration on the
part of the author of Acts, but it receives confirmation from Paul’s
own hand when he explained to the Corinthians that he would
stay in Ephesus because ‘a wide door for effective work has
opened to [him]’ (1 Corinthians16.8). The reasons for the suit-
ability of Ephesus are not hard to divine. It was a major centre
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