The Acts of the Apostles

LANDS, NATIONS, CITIES, AND HOUSES 87
been driven from Jerusalem ; this Church, however, was
at first according to xi. 19 purely Jewish-Christian—
the third passage is purely geographical. Phoenicia,
like Judasa and Samaria, appears as an independent
ecclesiastical " province," which cannot be said of the
Philistian cities,^ and to it we must also assign
Damascus. Concerning this city St. Luke possesses
special information, however improbable it is that he
himself visited it. He knows that it had several
synagogues (ix. 20), that one of its streets was
called « ^ evQela " (ix. ll),^ and that St. Paul took
up his abode there in the house of a man named
Judas.
Syria and Cilicia.
In the Acts Syria is mentioned three times purely
geographically as the goal of the journeys of St. Paul
(xviii. 18 : e^eirXei el^ rtjv ^vplav, xx. 3 : avayecrOaL
ek Trjv ^uplav, XXi. 3 : eTrXeOyaei/ ef? Trjv ^vpiav—
notice here the consistency of expression, which was
by no means a matter of course) ; in the two other
passages, where it again occurs, it stands— just as
in Gal. i. 21—together with Cilicia (xv. 23, 41), and
here we learn that the two provinces in St. Luke^s
^ This answers to what we know of the later circumstances.
The south-western cities of Palestine, including Cassarea, did
not form a proper ecclesiastical province, but were included with
Judaea.
2 'H pv/x7} 7) Kokovfiht) evdela. This use of KoXeiadai is char-
acteristic in regard to the consistency of St. Luke's style. It
occurs about fifteen times in the gospel and likewise fifteen times
in the Acts, including four times in the we-sections (xxvii. 8, 14,
16 xxviii. J
1).
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