The Church of Ephesus

As Revelation makes clear, there was an early church in Ephesus — the first of the seven churches of Asia to receive a letter (Revelation 2:1–7), praised for its perseverance and famously chided for abandoning "the love you had at first." The word "Ephesus" appears seventeen times in the New Testament: no city outside the Holy Land looms larger in the Christian scriptures.

From Paul's lecture hall to a great basilica

The congregation Paul founded in the 50s AD grew into one of Christianity's leading centers, traditionally led by Timothy and later associated with John the Evangelist. Its monumental home was the Church of Mary near the harbor — known as the Double Church, because one aisle is thought to have been dedicated to the Virgin and the other to Saint John. Built into a vast earlier Roman hall, it was among the first churches anywhere dedicated to Mary.

It earned its other name — the Council Church — in AD 431, when the Third Ecumenical Council is believed to have met here and proclaimed Mary Theotokos, Mother of God: one of the defining decisions of Christian doctrine, taken in this city because Mary's connection to Ephesus was already ancient.

A see on the move

The later story is a shuttle between two great buildings. After 654 the bishop of Ephesus moved his seat to the Basilica of Saint John on the fortified hill nearby, and remained there for two centuries — until raids in 867, when the Paulicians, a militant Armenian sect, stabled their horses in the basilica. The bishop returned to the Church of Mary, repaired and partly rebuilt for the purpose, and the two churches shared the community's devotions until the city itself faded.

Today you can walk both: the Double Church's atmospheric brick aisles inside the Ephesus site, and the basilica's marble terraces above Selcuk. On our Biblical Ephesus Tour they bracket the day like a pair of bookends.