A Name Paul Added at the End of Romans — and Found in the Corinthian Pavement

Romans 16 is the longest list of personal greetings in the Pauline letters — twenty-six names, most of them otherwise unknown to history. Near the end of the chapter, tucked between the names of Quartus and a general benediction, comes this: “Erastus, the city treasurer, and our brother Quartus, greet you” (Rom. 16:23, ESV). The Greek word Paul uses for “city treasurer” is oikonomos tēs poleōs — the city’s financial manager.

That name, Erastus, and that city, Corinth, came back into the picture ninety years ago under an excavation trowel.

The 1929 Find

In 1929, a team from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens was excavating near the north side of the ancient theater at Corinth. In the paving stones of a plaza adjacent to the theater, they uncovered a Latin inscription:

ERASTVS PRO AEDILIT[ATE] S·P·STRAVIT

“Erastus, in return for his aedileship, laid [this pavement] at his own expense.”

The name: Erastus. The city: Corinth. The approximate period: the first century CE, based on the archaeological context. John Harvey Kent catalogued it as inscription no. 232 in the standard corpus, Corinth: The Inscriptions, 1926–1950 (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1966), and noted the obvious question: could this be the same Erastus Paul mentioned in his letter to Rome?

The Temple of Apollo at Corinth, columns still standing from around 550 BCE. The Erastus inscription was found in the paving north of the ancient theater, within the same urban landscape Paul knew. Public Domain.

The Convergence — and the Complication

The case for identification is easy to state: the name matches, the city matches, and the date is consistent with Paul’s ministry in Corinth during the late 40s to early 50s CE. Many New Testament scholars have accepted the identification, treating the Erastus inscription as one of the clearer archaeological connections to a named Pauline correspondent.

The complication is the title. Paul calls his Erastus oikonomos tēs poleōs — a Greek designation for a financial administrator of the city. The inscription calls its Erastus an aedile (aedilis in Latin) — a magistrate responsible for public buildings, roads, and civic infrastructure. These were different positions in Roman municipal governance. They shared some overlapping civic prestige, but they were not the same office.

David W.J. Gill examined this discrepancy directly in a 1989 article in Tyndale Bulletin (“Erastus the Aedile”) and concluded that scholars should be cautious: the title mismatch, combined with the fact that Erastus was not a rare name in the Roman world, makes certain identification premature. The name could belong to a different prominent Corinthian citizen who happened to share it.

Andrew D. Clarke offered a response in Tyndale Bulletin the following year (“Another Corinthian Erastus Inscription,” 1991), proposing that the same man might have held both offices at different points in his career — first serving as oikonomos (at the time Paul wrote) and later rising to the aedileship (when the pavement was laid), or vice versa. Upward mobility through successive civic offices was a standard feature of the Roman cursus honorum at the municipal level, and a man of sufficient wealth and status to fund public paving would have been well positioned to hold multiple positions over time.

What We Can and Cannot Say

The current scholarly consensus sits at “probable candidate but not confirmed.” The convergence of name, city, and period is genuinely suggestive. The title discrepancy is a real problem that prevents a clean identification. The fact that the name Erastus appears in other Corinthian contexts — there may be more than one inscription — makes the question more complicated, not simpler.

What is not in dispute is the inscription itself. ERASTVS PRO AEDILIT[ATE] S·P·STRAVIT is still there, in its original position (in situ), in the paving stones north of the Corinthian theater. It has been in that spot since the first century. Paul wrote his letter to Rome from Corinth — quite possibly walking past that pavement, or the man who commissioned it, without either of them knowing that the greeting at the end of that letter would eventually generate centuries of scholarly debate.

References

• John Harvey Kent, Corinth: Results of Excavations, vol. 8, pt. 3, The Inscriptions, 1926–1950 (American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1966), no. 232
• Andrew D. Clarke, “Another Corinthian Erastus Inscription,” Tyndale Bulletin 42, no. 1 (1991): 146–151
• David W.J. Gill, “Erastus the Aedile,” Tyndale Bulletin 40, no. 2 (1989): 293–300

Comments

Loading comments…

Leave a comment

Comments are reviewed before being published. Only your name and comment are stored — no personal data collected.

Submit comment