Episode Details

What does it feel like to stand on the actual stone platform where Paul was put on trial—and to accidentally discover a plant growing in the ruins whose name means "Esther"?

In this rich episode of In the Margins, Anna and John explore Corinth—the wealthy, morally notorious crossroads city where Paul lived and worked for eighteen months, longer than almost anywhere else on his missionary journeys. Discover the staggering engineering of the Corinth Canal, cut nearly 300 feet through solid limestone, and learn about the ancient diolkos, a paved trackway where Greeks once dragged entire ships overland rather than risk 200 miles of treacherous open sea.

Walk through the Archaeological Museum where a fragment reading "Synagogue of the Hebrews" may be the very doorway Paul passed through, then stand at the Bema—the actual judgment seat where the Roman proconsul Gallio dismissed the case against Paul in Acts 18, an act of divine protection disguised as bureaucratic indifference. Hear the unexpectedly funny (and unexpectedly profound) story of a Greek woman shooing Anna and John away from a shade tree—only for Anna to discover afterward that the plant she'd been protecting was myrtle, the very plant referenced in Isaiah, Zechariah, and tied to the Hebrew name Hadassah... better known to us as Esther.

This episode reveals why 1 Corinthians 13's famous "Love is patient, love is kind" wasn't written as a wedding reading, but as pointed correction to a divided, quarrelsome, litigious church—and why taking communion in the very city where Paul first recorded the Lord's Supper instructions felt less like ritual and more like reaching across two thousand years and finding the table still set.

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