TARSUS tăr səs (Τάρσος). Tarsus (modern Tersous) is situated in the Cilician plain on the River Cydnus, some ten m. inland. This is a common setting for centers of civilization along that coast, once plagued by pirates. A calculation based on the wide extent of its traces, suggests that Tarsus once had half a million population. The lower reaches of the river were navigable so that Tarsus functioned as a port with a skillfully constructed haven on a lake between the city and the sea. Dion Chrysostom, speaking at Tarsus in a.d. 110, spoke of the city’s pride in her river with a touch of irony, and was critical of the environment. The people of Tarsus, however, made this the chief ground of their pride. They had made their own environment, taming the river to their needs, and building “no mean city,” as Paul said, appropriating a phrase of Euripides applied by that great dramatist to his native Athens (Acts 21:39; Euripides Ion 8).

Land communications involved engineering just as creditable. Some thirty m. inland from Tarsus lay the great barrier of the Tarsus mountains, cut by a deep pass known as the Cilician Gates. Through this pass Tarsus had driven a major highway. The city lay, therefore, virtually upon the sea in a corner of the Mediterranean where cultures mingled; E met W while the hinterland was open to her traffic. By her own strength she had made herself a nodal point of communications.

Tarsus was founded toward the end of the second millennium b.c., but the beginnings are shrouded in obscurity. One Mopsus is named among the founders, and the name appears to be Gr. It is a fair guess that Ionian Greeks, whose dynamic colonies dotted the western shoreline of Asia Minor, came also to Cilicia and joined a primitive settlement on the Cydnus. In the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, Javan is certainly the Ionians, and Tarshish, listed close to it, may in this context refer to Tarsus. There can be no certainty, but such an identification by no means rules out other interpretations of the word Tarshish in other contexts of the OT. To such guesswork are all attempts to date or to describe the beginnings of Tarsus reduced.

Nor can a connected account of the city’s story be given, even when the Eastern Mediterranean moves into the era of recorded history. The theme can be picked up only at various points, and some endeavor made to interpret isolated detail. The Assyrian conqueror Shalmaneser III, whose sanguinary reign can be dated 859 to 824 b.c., the king who wrote of “Jehu, son of Omri” on the Black Obelisk now in the British Museum, made brief reference to Tarsus in the records of his conquests and aggression.

The account must then pass over four centuries empty of significant detail. The year 401 b.c. can be pinpointed. Assyria and Babylon had left the stage of empire. Persia ruled a vast array of lands from the Aegean to the Indus. Tarsus was under a puppet king named Syennesis. The fact emerges from a famous and most significant book, the Anabasis of the Athenian soldier, adventurer, and literary man, Xenophon. One Cyrus, a satrap of the Aegean coast, had rebelled against the Great King. He recruited the famous Ten Thousand, a Gr. mercenary army, whose stubborn withdrawal from the Mesopotamian plain, through the Armenian mountains to Trebizond on the Black Sea, forms the well told story of Xenophon’s book. The author was one of the leaders of the great retreat. His first book describes the march through Asia Minor to the climax of the battle of Cynaxa. The column passed through the Cilician Gates and came to Tarsus where Syennesis ruled. It is likely that he was deposed after the crumbling of the revolt for failure to resist Cyrus’ advance, a hopeless task that he can hardly be blamed for avoiding.

Xenophon’s account of the Gr. exploit in marching out of the heart of the Pers. empire revealed to the young Alexander of Macedon, a half cent. later, the inherent weakness of the vast system. He applied the lesson and attacked Persia. Marching through Cilicia in 334 b.c., he found a Pers. governor in charge.

Coinage throws some light on this period. Greek notions and motives flood back into Tarsian coin designs after Alexander, but before the conquest the Oriental tone is dominant, suggesting that Gr. influence in Tarsus was at a low ebb. The strong Gr. presence, evidenced by the same art, reveals the firm integration of Tarsus and its province into the Seleucid Syrian regime, which followed the partition of Alexander’s empire. The Tarsus of Paul was visibly taking form and shape.

The region was ruled first as a province, for it was Seleucid policy to rule in provincial units after the pattern of the Pers. satrapies, and in the process, to discourage the habitual Gr. urge toward the autonomous city state. This policy was rudely interrupted by the inevitable clash with Rome. Under Antiochus the Great, Syria was moving westward in perennial ambition to recover the kingdoms that had broken free at the western end of the Asia Minor peninsula. Rome, simultaneously feeling for a stable eastern frontier, was moving in the opposite direction. Antiochus’ large designs extended to Greece itself, something of a vacuum of power on his westward frontiers. Rome had likewise felt the weakness of Greece as a buffer on her eastern flank. A confrontation could hardly be avoided, and it was to be expected that a victorious Rome would seek to stabilize her frontier as far as possible to the E. The peace treaty imposed on a humiliated Antiochus fixed Syria’s boundary on the Taurus mountains, and Cilicia became, in consequence, a border province. Readier agreement on the part of the Antioch government to grant Tarsus autonomy followed. How naturally it followed that a Tarsus should emerge that experienced and understood both worlds—E and W, Greek and Oriental, a Tarsus vividly aware of Rome, impregnated with Hellenic culture, but aware of the tides of thought and of religion in the lands of the E.

Paul was a natural product of this cultural environment. In writing to the sadly troubled Galatian church, the great apostle spoke of the purpose that had set him apart from birth for the difficult task of evangelizing the Gentile world. He obviously meant that Tarsus was no fortuitous birthplace for a man so called. Such a messenger had to be a Jew, imbued with the OT; he needed also to be a Gr., to interpret a nascent theology in the thought forms of Hellenic culture and to express what he had to teach in the subtle, rich language of the Greeks, the second tongue of all men from Italy to the Persian Gulf. Also, he had to be a Rom. citizen in the truest sense, understanding that mighty system, and conscious of the global opportunity it offered. No other man known to history from that time combined these qualities as did Paul of Tarsus. It is difficult to imagine any other place whose whole atmosphere and history could have so effectively produced them in one person. Paul was a Heb. trained under the notable Gamaliel. He could talk and think like a Gr. and quote his native Cilician poets to the intellectuals of Athens. He could write strong Gr. in closely argued documents. He was by birth a citizen of Rome.

The last sentence makes it necessary to return to the fragmented history of Tarsus. After the clash with Antiochus, which ended with the battle of Magnesia in 190 b.c., Rome was on the border of the Cilician region. In 171 b.c., Antiochus Epiphanes seems to have conceded a much wider autonomy to Tarsus. Unrest in that dynamic city, in which the Jewish minority seems to have played an important part, had forced the hand of the Antioch government (the curious story of the insurrection in Tarsus is told in 2 Macc 4:30-50). A major reorganization of the constitution followed. One provision was the establishment in the ward system of the city of a “tribe” of Jews with full citizenship. When Paul, writing to the Rom. church, spoke of his kinsmen, as he did four times in that letter, it was prob. to his fellow tribesmen of Tarsus that he thus referred.

Antiochus Epiphanes, who made this major concession to Jews of the Dispersion in Tarsus, was the notorious savage persecutor and oppressor of the Jews of Pal. This was because Palestinian Jewry was resistant toward the monarch’s passionate desire to Hellenize his realms. It was a quest for unity, not without its merits had it been pursued with deeper understanding and some tincture of mercy. In Tarsus, on the other hand, the Jews were tolerant toward Hellenism. Witness Paul’s use of metaphors from the Gr. games and the liberality of outlook that they suggest. The same Paul is evidence that a rigid Judaism could accompany such tolerance toward the Greeks. Such was the spirit of Tarsian Jewry, proud of their city, willingly integrated into its social system, but loyal to their ancient faith.

Rome first effectively penetrated the region in 104 b.c., and the next half cent. was one of lamentable strife and upheaval in Asia Minor, an era of tension ended only by the reorganization of the whole complex of nations at the eastern end of the Mediterranean by Pompey in 65 and 64 b.c. Under Pompey’s system, Cilicia became a Rom. area of command. Fourteen years later in 51 b.c., the great orator and statesman Cicero became governor of the province, and it is perhaps indicative of the trouble and anarchy that this once ordered corner of the Mediterranean had endured, that one of Cicero’s tasks was the pacification of bandit-ridden hill country in the province. In like manner, and as significantly, Pompey had received a special command in 63 b.c. to cleanse the eastern Mediterranean of pirates, so indigenous to this particular coast that they were often referred to as “Cilician pirates.” Resurgent orientalism led by Rome’s great opponent, the able king Mithridates of Pontus, had led to the anarchy and social breakdown that is evident from these events. Rome’s intervention and pacification were welcomed by civilized communities, and among such groups the Jews would figure prominently. The Jews of the Dispersion were an urban people, moving into the world of finance and commerce, which was to become the medieval characteristic of their race. Above all, they needed peace, and Pompey no doubt found in the Tarsian Jews a force making for tranquility and order. Rome was empiric in her organization. She chose and promoted those elements of authority and stability she found operative in regions that she penetrated. It was prob. from some situation at this time that the Rom. citizenship was conferred on a group of Jews at Tarsus, a group shrewd enough to read the signs, to feel the winds of coming change and profit by them. Once conferred, the Rom. privilege was transmitted by birth. Thus Paul became a Rom. citizen, a status that helped to form his outlook and that determined the pattern of his evangelism.

A brilliant period in the history of Tarsus followed. It became the Athens of the eastern Mediterranean, the ancient equivalent of a university city, the resort of men of learning, the home town of Athenodorus (74 b.c.-a.d. 7), the respected teacher of Augustus himself, the seat of a school of Stoic philosophers, a place of learning and disputation, the very climate in which a brilliant mind might grow up in the midst of stimulus and challenge and learn to think and to contend.

Like all boys of his race, the young Tarsian Jew also learned a trade (Acts 18:3). He wove the native goat’s hair of the province into a rough linen, often used as tent cloth, and known from its place of origin as “cilicium.” From references in Lat. lit. it would appear that cilicium was also used as sailcloth and leggings. Its manufacture was a prime industry of Tarsus, for it appears that the mass of its population were linen workers who were disenfranchised by the timocratic constitution, which demanded a charge of 500 drachmas for the privilege of citizenship. This property qualification, or “means test,” seems to have been an invention of Athenodorus, who after thirty years in Rome returned to Tarsus in 15 b.c. In true Platonic tradition, he sought by persuasion and philosophy to purge local politics. Failing, as philosophers in such situations have invariably done, Athenodorus used his vast influence with Augustus to banish the more corrupt of the city’s leaders. A timocratic constitution followed.

The founding of the Tarsian church was prob. due to Paul. Many of the trials, perils, and adventures listed by him in the biographical passage of 2 Corinthians 11:24-27 took place in Cilicia—its city, hinterland and neighboring seas.

Bibliography W. M. Ramsay, The Cities of Saint Paul (1908); E. M. Blaiklock, The Cities of the New Testament (1965).