praitōrion

This is a Latin word carried straight over into Greek without being translated, the way English keeps "villa" or "forum". In the Roman army it first named the commander's tent, then the headquarters of any senior officer, and finally the official residence a Roman governor took over in the province he was sent to run. It was a job description attached to a building, never the proper name of one particular house.

That is why it points to two different addresses in the New Testament. In Jerusalem it names whichever grand building Pilate used when he came up from the coast to keep order during the festival. At Caesarea it names the seaside palace Herod the Great had built, which the Roman governors moved into after him and where Paul was kept for two years.

One such building did several jobs at once, and the word carries all of them together:

• it was where the governor lived while he was in that city
• it quartered the soldiers who travelled with him
• it held prisoners waiting for a hearing
• it was where he sat in public to judge a case

Mark expects that some of his readers will not know the borrowed word, so he stops to explain it: the soldiers took Jesus inside the courtyard (αὐλή), which, he tells them, is the governor's headquarters.

Paul writes from prison that his chains have become known throughout the whole of it, and he is almost certainly naming people rather than a building. A prisoner sent up for the emperor's hearing was held by an elite corps quartered at the capital, several thousand strong, and Roman writers used this same word for that corps as a body. A building cannot come to know why a man is in chains; a barracks full of soldiers can.

Older English Bibles read the word the other way and render it "palace", which is why some readers picture Paul chained inside a royal house. The difference changes the point of the sentence. On the reading taken here, Paul is saying that the message about Christ has worked its way through the very troops assigned to hold him, which is a small triumph, not a note about his address.

This meaning hangs on one verse, and it is genuinely argued over, since scholars who place the letter's writing in Caesarea rather than Rome read the word there in its ordinary sense of a governor's headquarters. The two readings are set out below.