stadios

The Greek world measured travel by the length of its running track. One stade ran six hundred Greek feet, close to two hundred yards or a little under a fifth of a mile, and about an eighth of the Roman mile that the empire stamped on its roads. So when a New Testament writer tells you how far apart two things are, he is counting racetracks laid end to end.

The counts follow a steady pattern:

• the figure is usually rounded, as with a boat that had rowed about twenty five or thirty of them
• the distance is measured out from a fixed landmark, so many stades from the shore or from Jerusalem
• in Revelation the numbers run into the thousands, far past anything a traveler would pace off

That last point is why the two senses below are worth keeping apart. Most of the time the word answers how far one place lies from another, a plain traveler's figure that a first reader could check against a familiar road. In Revelation it instead measures the size of a thing, the reach of a river of blood or the length, width, and height of a city, and there the round numbers may be carrying meaning of their own rather than simply reporting a measurement.

The unit of distance took its name from this place. A Greek running course was one stade long, a straight strip of packed earth with banks on either side where the crowd stood, and every city of any size had one. The English word "stadium" comes directly from it, though the picture has changed: this was a narrow lane of track about two hundred yards long, not a bowl seating tens of thousands.

Paul uses the word once. He asks the Corinthians whether they know that of all who run on the track, only one takes the prize. Corinth hosted the Isthmian games every other year, so his readers had walked past such a course and watched what happened on it. English versions usually render the phrase "in a race", which is clear enough but quietly moves the word from the ground to what happens on it, which Greek says with other words: the running or course covered (δρόμος) and the contest itself (ἀγών).

Keeping the place in view sharpens the point. Paul is not saying that only one Christian finishes; he is pointing at a fixed course with a marked end and a single prize, and telling his readers to run the way people run when the finish line is real.