Gallio and Paul at Corinth

The event

During his second missionary journey, Paul spent a year and a half in Corinth, a bustling Roman colony and trade hub, teaching the word of God and building a church out of a wildly diverse congregation of Jews and Gentiles (Acts 18:1-11). There he partnered with Priscilla and Aquila, a Jewish couple who, like Paul, made tents for a living and had recently arrived from Rome after the emperor Claudius expelled Jews from the capital.

Opposition eventually came to a head when Corinth's Jewish community hauled Paul before the newly arrived Roman proconsul, Gallio, accusing him of persuading people "to worship God contrary to the law" (Acts 18:13). Gallio, seeing the charge as an internal religious dispute rather than a matter of Roman law, threw the case out without even letting Paul speak in his own defense (Acts 18:14-16) - an early and important precedent that Roman authorities did not consider Christianity a punishable offense in its own right.

This otherwise minor courtroom scene has become one of the single most valuable anchors for reconstructing New Testament chronology. An inscription discovered at Delphi records a letter from the emperor Claudius that fixes Gallio's proconsulship of Achaia to around AD 51-52. Since Acts places Paul in Corinth during Gallio's term, this inscription allows scholars to date Paul's Corinthian ministry with unusual confidence and, working backward and forward from it, to build the rest of Paul's missionary chronology - which otherwise depends on internal details of Acts and Paul's letters and remains genuinely debated in its finer points.

Dating

The Gallio (Delphi) inscription is the single firmest fixed point in Pauline chronology; most other dates in Paul's ministry are calculated relative to it and carry considerably more uncertainty.

Scripture references

• Acts 18:1-17

Other witnesses

• Delphi (Gallio) Inscription, SIG² 801

Further reading

• Bible Odyssey (SBL): Erastus, Gallio, and Paul