Caesarea

Caesarea (Caesarea Maritima) was the great Roman port on the Mediterranean coast of Palestine, about seventy miles northwest of Jerusalem at the northern edge of the plain of Sharon. Built by Herod the Great on the site of the old Strato's Tower and dedicated about 10 BC, it was named in honor of Caesar Augustus and boasted a vast artificial deep-water harbor (Sebastos), a theater, temples, an aqueduct, and a hippodrome. As the seat of the Roman governor and the administrative capital of Judaea, Caesarea was the political center of the land in the New Testament era — and, providentially, the threshold over which the gospel first crossed from Jew to Gentile.

Its supreme moment in Scripture is the conversion of Cornelius, the God-fearing Roman centurion. There an angel directed Cornelius to send for Peter; Peter, prepared by his vision of the sheet let down from heaven, came to Caesarea and preached Christ, and "the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word" — Gentiles who then were baptized (Acts 10:44–48). Peter's confession there, "Truly I understand that God shows no partiality" (Acts 10:34–35), marks the formal opening of the church to the nations, a turning point Peter later defended before the Jerusalem church.

Caesarea recurs throughout Acts. It was the harbor through which Paul passed on his journeys (Acts 9:30; Acts 18:22), and the home of Philip the evangelist, in whose house Paul lodged and where the prophet Agabus foretold his binding (Acts 21:8–11). After his arrest in Jerusalem, Paul was brought to Caesarea and held there about two years, making his defenses before the governors Felix and Festus and before King Agrippa II, to whom he declared, "I appeal to Caesar" (Acts 25:11); his great testimony before Agrippa, where the king said, "In a short time would you persuade me to be a Christian?" is recorded in Acts 26:28. From Caesarea Paul at last set sail for Rome (Acts 27:1).

The city was also the scene of divine judgment: when Herod Agrippa I accepted the crowd's acclamation of him as a god, "immediately an angel of the Lord struck him down... and he was eaten by worms and breathed his last" (Acts 12:21–23). (This Caesarea is distinct from Caesarea Philippi in the far north, where Peter confessed Jesus as the Christ.) In the wider story of the early church Caesarea stands as the gateway city — the place where the wall between Jew and Gentile fell, and from which the gospel reached out toward the empire's heart.