What the map shows
This is the land and sea between Rome and Jerusalem, about 2,300 km across, built from measured heights, with no modern borders, roads or towns drawn on it. Pick one of Paul’s four journeys and step through its places in the order Acts names them. At each place you see the verse that puts Paul there, in the World English Bible, and the leg that brought him: how far it is by the Roman roads or across the sea, and how long it took, when Acts tells us.
Added up along our lines, the four journeys come to about 7,180 km by road (4,460 miles) and 7,890 km by sea (4,900 miles), some 9,400 miles in all. The lines are ours, though, and not a trace of Paul’s footsteps. Acts names the towns but never the roads between them, and it says nothing of the many years Paul spent in other places.
The mountains are drawn five times taller than they are, so that you can see the ranges Paul crossed, and a note in the corner of the map says so.
The verse at each place and the lines from Paul’s letters are Scripture, in the World English Bible. Where each town stood comes from OpenBible.info and Pleiades, where the Roman roads ran comes from the Itiner-e atlas, and the date of Paul’s stay in Corinth comes from the Gallio inscription at Delphi. Everything else is our own work: we picked the road between each pair of named places, drew every sea crossing, measured the distances along them, and worked out the days on foot and the years of each journey.
A few places rest on readings someone could dispute, and the note at each one says so. We take “Greece” in Acts 20 to mean Corinth and the “went up” of Acts 18 to mean a visit to Jerusalem, we choose the towns that stand for the regions Acts names, and we judge which visit a line in one of his letters remembers.
How we drew the roads, the sea and the times
Between two places Acts names, we followed the shortest way along the roads in the Itiner-e atlas of Roman roads. Itiner-e grades every road by how well its course is known: “certain” where it is known, “conjectured” where scholars have inferred it, and “hypothetical” where it is a guess. Most of the roads of inland Asia Minor are conjectured, and each place tells you how much of the road that brought Paul there is. Where a town sits off the network, a short straight line joins it to the roads, and that line counts in the distance.
We drew the sea crossings ourselves, taking the shortest open water between the named places, keeping a few kilometres off the coast, and passing the places Acts says the ship passed, such as Cyprus “on the left hand”. Ships went where the wind let them rather than in straight lines, so the real voyages were longer than ours.
On land we count a day’s walk as 20 Roman miles, about 29.6 km. Vegetius, in his handbook on the Roman army, says recruits had to cover that distance at the ordinary military step in five summer hours (Epitoma rei militaris 1.9). It is our assumption and not a record of Paul, who stopped, preached, worked and waited for ships.
At sea we give days only where Acts gives them: two days from Troas to Neapolis and five on the way back, a day for each hop down the coast of Asia, fourteen nights in the storm, and two days from Rhegium to Puteoli. Where Acts gives no time, neither does the map.
The years start in Corinth, where Paul was brought before Gallio, proconsul of Achaia (Acts 18:12). An inscription at Delphi, dated to about AD 52, names Gallio as proconsul, and so most scholars put Paul’s year and a half in Corinth around AD 50–52. We count the other years from there with the spans of time Acts gives, and scholars’ dates for them differ by a year or two.
The highest point on each road leg comes from the heights Itiner-e records along its roads. The land itself is drawn from the Terrain Tiles at zoom level 7, which give a height about every kilometre, so the valleys and peaks come out smoother than they are.
The coast has moved since Paul’s day, too. Ephesus and Miletus were ports then, but their harbours have silted up and the sea is now kilometres away, so their sea lines run to the old cities.
Moving around
Pick a journey above the card, then a place, or step through with the arrows. Drag the land to turn it, and scroll or pinch to come closer.
1to 4 the four journeys
←→ the previous or next place
0back to the place’s own view after you have dragged the map
Nlabels on or off; H hides everything but the map
Sources and licences
- Scripture: the World English Bible, public domain.
- Places: OpenBible.info Bible Geocoding Data, CC BY 4.0, for where each place in Acts was; checked against Pleiades, CC BY 3.0. For 40 of the 48 places the two agree to within 3 km, except the island of Samothrace, where they are 7 km apart at most. We could not match the other eight in Pleiades (Seleucia, Berea, Cnidus, Salmone, Cauda, Malta, Syracuse and Rhegium), so they rest on OpenBible alone.
- Roads: “Itiner-e: the digital atlas of ancient roads © 2024 by Brughmans, Pažout, de Soto and Bjerregaard Vahlstrup is licensed under CC BY 4.0.” Data: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17122148 (static version 2024); paper: de Soto and others, Scientific Data (2025), doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06140-z. We chose the roads between places and measured them.
- Elevation: Terrain Tiles on AWS, terrarium format, zoom 7, built by Mapzen with tilezen/joerd. SRTM and GMTED2010 terrain data courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey; ETOPO1, U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union – EU-DEM layers. We joined and cropped the tiles, rounded land heights to the metre and drew the sea flat. The European Union does not endorse this page.
- The Gallio inscription: Bible Odyssey (Society of Biblical Literature), “Erastus, Gallio, and Paul: Insights from Inscriptions”.
- The day’s march: Vegetius, Epitoma rei militaris 1.9, Latin text at The Latin Library, public domain: “Militari ergo gradu XX milia passuum horis quinque dumtaxat aestiuis conficienda sunt.”
- Drawn with three.js (MIT licence).