In 1856, English chemistry student William Henry Perkin (1838–1907) was looking for a cure for malaria – he stumbled upon a way to make a synthetic purple dye from coal tar.
In so doing, he literally changed history, for his discovery led to advances in medicine, photography, perfumery, food production, and revolutionised the fashion industry.
Making ancient Tyrian purple
Purple has long been valued as a colour because, for many years, obtaining it entailed a monumental difficulty. According to the Roman scientist Pliny the Elder, who died in the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, the best purple dye in the Ancient Near East was manufactured at the Phoenician city of Tyre (for the association of Tyre with purple dye, see 2 Chronicles 2:7).
The raw material out of which this dye was manufactured was obtained from the glandular secretion – or tears, as the Christian commentator Isidore of Seville poetically put it – of a carnivorous sea snail, which contemporary science knows as the Murex brandaris. Somewhere around 12,000 of these snails had to be harvested from the sea to produce merely 0.05 of an ounce of dye. A foul stench emanated from the Phoenician factories manufacturing the dye; understandably they were situated on the outskirts of the city. Tyrian purple, as it was known, was literally worth more than its weight in gold and purple-dyed fabrics commanded exorbitant prices. As Pliny noted of ancient fashion: ‘It adds radiance to every garment,’ and this led to what he called a frantic ‘passion for purple’ among the upper and middle classes of his world. The Old Testament world of the Ancient Near East had been similarly shaped by this passion for purple, where it was associated with royalty and prestige and power (e.g. Prov. 31:22; Song 3:9–10, 7:5; Dan. 5:7; Esth. 8:15).
The Christian seller of purple
So, what does this ancient purple dye have to do with the gospel? Well, in Luke’s Book of Acts we read that when the apostle Paul came to the city of Philippi in 49AD, he met a woman named Lydia, who was originally from the city of Thyatira in the Roman province of Asia (modern-day Turkey). Ethnically she was Greek, but she had come to believe that the Jewish Old Testament contained the truth about God and the world, and thus she regularly met with a number of sincere Jewish women to pray and worship (Acts 16:14–15).
We are also told by Luke that she was ‘a dealer in purple’ (v.14), which meant that she either sold the dye, or, more likely, sold purple-dyed clothing. Either way, she would have been a woman of wealth and substance. Her regeneration by the Holy Spirit—’the Lord opened her heart’ (v.14) – led to her baptism and to her encouraging Paul to use her home as a base of mission in the city of Philippi.
If one reads through the Book of Acts, it is apparent that when Paul went with the gospel to a new city, a key part of his mission strategy was to find a place where the churches that were founded through the preaching of the gospel could meet for distinctively Christian worship and fellowship. So it was that in Philippi, the Lord used the wealth that Lydia had obtained by the selling of purple clothing to rich and elite women – women who had a ‘passion for purple’ – to serve Paul’s preaching and teaching about the Lord Christ.
The God who so made the Murex brandaris that its glands contained the base for purple appears to have had a greater purpose in mind than the making of a snail, glorious though that was!
