many races and cultures, including the native peoples, cultured Greeks, Orientals, and Jews. At the end of the first century A.D., the total population of these five huge provinces was approximately 8.5 million, one million of whom were Jews and eighty thousand, Christians. Luke explains in Acts that Paul did not minister in these northern provinces on any of his missionary journeys. On one occasion, he was forbidden by the Holy Spirit to travel there and directed, instead, to Troas and then to Macedonia