The Erastus Inscription at Corinth

Northeast of the theatre at ancient Corinth, set in the pavement of a public square, lies a block of grey-pink limestone about five feet long and twenty-one inches high. Its face carries cuttings for bronze letters roughly six inches tall, with traces of the lead that anchored them still in the sockets.

The bronze was stripped long ago. The cuttings are perfectly legible. T. L. Shear of the American School of Classical Studies uncovered the block in the 1929 season and reported it in the American Journal of Archaeology that year.

It is still there, in the open air, where he found it.

Restored, it reads: ERASTVS PRO AEDILIT[AT]E S(VA) P(ECVNIA) STRAVIT — "Erastus, in return for his aedileship, laid this pavement at his own expense."

This was ordinary Roman civic practice. A man elected to magistracy repaid the city with a public benefaction and put his name on it. The aedile of a Roman colony had charge of streets, markets and public buildings; paving the square outside the theatre was precisely his department.

One oddity explains itself here. Corinth was Greek, but the inscription is Latin, because Julius Caesar refounded the ruined city in 44 BC as a Roman colony — Colonia Laus Iulia Corinthiensis — settled with freedmen and veterans, governed on the Roman municipal pattern, with Latin as its official language and aediles among its magistrates.

That is also why so many of Paul's Corinthian contacts carry Latin names: Gaius, Crispus, Fortunatus, Quartus, Tertius, Justus. The name-list in Romans 16 reads like the population of a Roman colony, because that is what Corinth was.

Romans 16:23, written from Corinth: "Erastus the treasurer of the city saluteth you." Paul's Greek is ho oikonomos tēs poleōs — the city's steward, its financial officer.

Erastus appears twice more. Paul sends him with Timothy into Macedonia (Acts 19:22). And in the last letter, a note in passing: "Erastus remained at Corinth" (2 Timothy 4:20).

A Corinthian believer holding a named municipal financial office is exactly the man Paul describes.

John Goodrich argued in New Testament Studies (2010) that oikonomos in an Achaean colony renders the Latin quaestor — the city's treasury magistrate, a post of real rank. In the Roman ladder a man served as quaestor and could then stand for the aedileship.

On that reading Paul greets Erastus in the office below, and the pavement records the office he won afterward. The chronology fits without strain: the letter forms and the square's stratigraphy place the inscription in the middle of the first century.

Paul's letters are full of ordinary names — Phoebe, Gaius, Quartus, Tertius. Critics have long read the Pauline house churches as socially marginal and their name lists as unverifiable.

Here one of those names appears to have paid for a public square, in the city Paul names, in the decade Paul was there, in the kind of office Paul assigns him. The letter's world and the excavated city touch at a point you can stand on.