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.