Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean Sea did more to spread religion across the ancient world than any army. Phoenician sailors carried the cult of their own city gods, Melqart of Tyre chief among them, to colonies at Carthage, Cadiz and across Sicily and Sardinia, seeding shrines wherever their ships put in centuries before Rome existed. Greek colonists did the same eastward and westward at once, planting sanctuaries to Apollo, Artemis and Demeter from Massalia to Cyrene, so that a common religious vocabulary ran the length of the sea long before any single power controlled it.

Rome's own conquest turned that patchwork into what its writers called Mare Nostrum, our sea, and the peace it enforced let religious traffic move faster than ever. Jewish communities settled in every major port, Alexandria and Rome above all, carrying their scriptures and their synagogues with them. When Christianity emerged from that same diaspora world, it used the same Roman shipping lanes and the same coastal roads to spread from Antioch and Jerusalem to Rome within a single generation, the apostle Paul crossing the sea himself on mission after mission.

Islam's seventh and eighth century conquests closed the circle from the other direction, bringing the sea's entire southern and eastern rim, Egypt, the Levant and North Africa, under a single new faith within decades. From the Phoenician shrine to the Pauline mission to the Islamic conquest, the same body of water carried each wave of belief to the next shore before the last one had finished arriving.

Some of the Mediterranean's religious connections have names and addresses rather than generalities. Paul's own voyages, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, are geography as much as theology: Ephesus, Corinth, Crete and finally a shipwreck on Malta, where Acts says the local people showed the shipwrecked crew unusual kindness, on the way to trial and eventual death in Rome. The letters he wrote from and to Mediterranean ports, Corinth especially, are read today alongside the excavated city itself, where the marketplace, the bema and the meat market his own letters mention still stand.

The Phoenician diaspora left its own trail westward from Tyre and Sidon, planting temples to Melqart and Astarte at Carthage, Cadiz and across Sicily and Sardinia centuries before either Paul or Rome. Delos, treated as sacred ground by the Greeks who kept births and deaths off the island entirely, became by the second century BCE one of the sea's most religiously mixed places, its excavated synagogue of the Samaritans standing near a sanctuary of the Syrian gods and shrines to Egyptian Isis and Serapis within a few hundred metres of each other.

Alexandria outdid them both. Its Jewish community produced the Septuagint, the Greek translation of Hebrew scripture that most early Christians actually read, and its catechetical school gave Christianity Clement and Origen, two of its first systematic theologians. A visitor can still trace all four claims, the shipwreck, the temples, the sanctuary and the translation, on the ground.