1For you yourselves know, brothers, our visit to you wasn’t in vain, 2but having suffered before and been shamefully treated, as you know, at Philippi, we grew bold in our God to tell you the Good News of God in much conflict. 3For our exhortation is not of error, nor of uncleanness, nor in deception. 4But even as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the Good News, so we speak—not as pleasing men, but God, who tests our hearts. 5For neither were we at any time found using words of flattery, as you know, nor a cloak of covetousness (God is witness), 6nor seeking glory from men (neither from you nor from others), when we might have claimed authority as apostles of Christ. 7But we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother cherishes her own children.
8Even so, affectionately longing for you, we were well pleased to impart to you not the Good News of God only, but also our own souls, because you had become very dear to us. 9For you remember, brothers, our labor and travail; for working night and day, that we might not burden any of you, we preached to you the Good News of God. 10You are witnesses with God how holy, righteously, and blamelessly we behaved ourselves toward you who believe. 11As you know, we exhorted, comforted, and implored every one of you, as a father does his own children, 12to the end that you should walk worthily of God, who calls you into his own Kingdom and glory.
13For this cause we also thank God without ceasing that when you received from us the word of the message of God, you accepted it not as the word of men, but as it is in truth, God’s word, which also works in you who believe. 14For you, brothers, became imitators of the assemblies of God which are in Judea in Christ Jesus; for you also suffered the same things from your own countrymen, even as they did from the Jews 15who killed both the Lord Jesus and their own prophets, and drove us out, and don’t please God, and are contrary to all men, 16forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved, to fill up their sins always. But wrath has come on them to the uttermost.
17But we, brothers, being bereaved of you for a short season in presence, not in heart, tried even harder to see your face with great desire, 18because we wanted to come to you—indeed, I, Paul, once and again—but Satan hindered us. 19For what is our hope, or joy, or crown of rejoicing? Isn’t it even you, before our Lord Jesus at his coming? 20For you are our glory and our joy.
Philippi, an important early center of Christianity, was founded as a Roman colony and named after the father of Alexander the Great. It was at the city a woman named Lydia (and her family) converted to Christianity after hearing Paul’s teaching, and convinced the Apostle to stay with her. After Paul cast a demon out of a fortune-telling slave girl he was put in the city’s prison. While Paul and Silas were praying and singing in the jail there was an earthquake, freeing the men. After Paul convinced the jailer not to kill himself, the jailer also converted (Acts 16:11-34). These believers grew into a church, and by the time of Paul’s letter to them, he praised them for their assistance his ministry. The city itself prospered until the seventh century, when attacks from Slavic raiders and several severe earthquakes put the city into a long gradual decline. The area remained largely abandoned until the new town of Krinides was built nearby in the twentieth century.
Philippi was excavated beginning in 1917 by the French School of Archaeology at Athens. They uncovered a Roman era agora, built on top of an older market that was likely the “marketplace” Silas and Paul were dragged to before being imprisoned. They also found the ruins of a fourth-century church dedicated to Paul, and another large fourth-century church just outside the city.
They also uncovered a structure popularly thought to be the prison Paul and Silas were put in. However, the area was not a prison but a complex of religious buildings first erected in the Hellenistic period. Prisons were not built in a religious complex. Nevertheless, frescoes and a small chapel were found in it, leading to the idea that it was the site of Paul’s imprisonment.
Randall Price and H. Wayne House, Zondervan Handbook of Biblical Archaeology (Grand Rapids, Mich. 2017), 314-316.