After this fairly long bus ride of heading from Goereme, Cappadocia to Tarsus, I was excited to go and discover the birth place of the legendary apostle Paul.

I’m looking out my hotel room window;

I see this, its a restaurant.  It looks nice but its not open at the few days I was there.  Maybe its only open during the summer season.

In the past I often wondered when the bible talks about Paul being a tent maker, if its literally a canvass dwelling or something else.   I can only find one reference in the scriptures;

Acts 18 : 18 After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, 3 and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them.

Corinth and Athens are of course in Greece.   Pontus was in now what we call Turkey on the Black Sea coast the opposite side of where I am now.

Looking at this now, it makes sense if you are running a business for a temporary amount of time, a fabric walled place is what you need, easy to dismantle and move to where you want.  Today’s Turks are very industrious type of people, I went past a lot of small factories, metal workshops and carpenters, and as you can see here another steel frame is there ready to hang another canvass on when needed.

With Paul’s ministry being making disciples he got to stay with a lot of kind people who took him in, but maybe he could of made a kind of ‘flat pack kit church’ if there wasn’t a home (or cave!) big enough to hold the early believers in.

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