Sergius Paulus Inscriptions

Four Candidates

Acts 13:7 places the apostles at Paphos before the proconsul of Cyprus, whom it names Sergius Paulus. The word proconsul is itself correct and worth noting in passing: Cyprus was a senatorial province in this period, and senatorial provinces were governed by proconsuls. Four inscriptions have been put forward at one time or another as naming the man himself.

The first comes from Soloi on the north coast of Cyprus, catalogued as IGR III 930, a text dated by a regnal year of Claudius that mentions a proconsul Paulus. D. G. Hogarth, who published it after his archaeological survey of the island, saw no good reason to doubt the identification with the figure in Acts. T. B. Mitford, the authority on Roman Cyprus, judged on epigraphic grounds that the stone cannot be earlier than the middle of the first century and is probably considerably later. Accounts even disagree about when it was found, giving the year variously as 1877 and 1887.

The second is a boundary marker of the Tiber from Rome, CIL VI 31545, recording the commissioners appointed in AD 47 to oversee the banks and channel of the river under Claudius. One of the named commissioners is L. Sergius Paullus. This is the only one of the four whose date is secure. B. Windle argued in the Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin in 2022 that the ordinary Roman career ladder makes it entirely plausible that the same man held a river commissionership at Rome and a proconsulship in Cyprus within a few years — and he is careful to call it plausible rather than demonstrated.

The third is a pair of texts from the territory of Pisidian Antioch naming senators called L. Sergius Paullus, one of them explicitly the younger; the second was copied in 1912 by W. Ramsay and J. G. C. Anderson. Ramsay proposed from them that the family held estates in the region, and the popular inference followed that the proconsul sent Paul and Barnabas on to his relatives' home town, which is where Acts 13:13 takes them next. That is a hypothesis about a family's landholdings, not an identification of a man, and T. Kennedy — writing from within evangelical archaeology — says as much himself, calling the family-ties explanation of that next journey "possible, though unconfirmed and only a hypothesis based on circumstantial evidence." The fourth, IGR III 935 from Kythrea in Cyprus, is the weakest: it preserves the name Quintus Ser[gius], which is the wrong first name, has lost the part where a cognomen would sit, and has lost its emperor's name as well — the restoration is open between Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, and only the last of the three would fit.

Why Anyone Cares

The interest is not that a Roman official's existence needs propping up. It is that Acts 13 is the moment the mission turns outward, and it turns on a named Roman with a named office in a named city — the kind of claim that is checkable in principle. Luke does this constantly, and it is why his book invites this sort of scrutiny in the first place. An author who wrote only in generalities would be safe from it.

There is a second, quieter reason. The Sergii Paulli were a real senatorial family with a documented presence in exactly the eastern provinces Acts moves through. Even without a one-to-one match, the inscriptions place families of that name and rank in Cyprus and in the Anatolian interior in the middle of the first century — which is the world Acts describes, populated by the kind of people Acts says were in it.

Nobody Has Closed This

What the four candidates have in common is that each preserves a Sergius or a Paulus, and none of them names the proconsul of Acts in a way that settles the matter. Sergius Paulus was not a rare combination in a family that produced senators for generations. The candidate T. B. Mitford went out of his way to doubt is the one with the secure date — the Tiber boundary stone. His footnote of 1947 opens by warning that "it is far from certain that the Sergius Paulus of the Acts bore the praenomen Lucius", observes that the Tiber commissioner was a Lucius and therefore an ex-consul, and closes: "That he is to be identified with the proconsul of Cyprus is at best a conjecture, now somewhat weakened by Myres' reading of IGR iii, 935" — that last being the Kythrea text, the fourth candidate above. His objection to the Soloi stone is a different one, and it is the dating objection already given: on epigraphic grounds it "cannot be earlier" than the middle of the first century "and is in all probability considerably later". Kennedy reads the same four texts the other way, and he should be represented as saying what he says: he concludes that "at least two, but perhaps three" of them "probably refer to the Sergius Paulus on Cyprus also mentioned in the book of Acts." That is a stronger reading than this app is prepared to give, and his own word for it is still probably.

Where the app stands. The honest statement is short, and it is not a retreat. Acts names a proconsul of Cyprus called Sergius Paulus and describes the province's government correctly for the period. Roman Cyprus was governed by proconsuls of that kind, from families of that kind, and one of them may well be standing on one of these stones. But this app is not going to tell a reader that Sergius Paulus has been found, because he has not been. What has been found is a family, a plausible career pattern, and a set of texts that fit without fastening.

It is worth saying what refusing the overclaim costs, because the answer is nothing. No one's faith is resting on a proconsul's career. A reader who is told unsettled loses an argument they never needed, and gains the ability to believe the next sentence this app writes about a stone. A reader who is told confirmed and then finds Mitford loses considerably more than that.

Scripture references

• Acts 13:6-12 — Paphos, the proconsul, and the confrontation with Elymas
• Acts 13:7 — The proconsul named, with the correct title for a senatorial province
• Acts 13:13 — The next leg of the journey, which the Pisidian Antioch hypothesis tries to explain

Sources

• Holding institutionOhio State University Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies — CIL VI photographic collection — The Ohio State University Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies · Catalogue entry for CIL VI 31545: boundary marker of the Tiber set up by the curatores riparum et alvei Tiberis, reign of Claudius, with cross-reference to the Epigraphic Database RomaSupports: The identity, character and date of the Tiber inscription
• ScholarshipT. B. Mitford, "Notes on Some Published Inscriptions from Roman Cyprus" — Terence B. Mitford, Annual of the British School at Athens 42 (1947), 201-230 · Read in the scanned volume at the Internet Archive. Mitford opens the article with the Soloi stone, IGR III 930, and puts the epigraphic dating objection on page 205: the inscription "cannot be earlier" than the middle of the first century "and is in all probability considerably later". His "at best a conjecture" is a separate judgement in a footnote on page 206, note 22, and it is about the Tiber stone, not this one — the whole note is about whether the proconsul of Acts was a Lucius at all. His own footnote on the Soloi identification is worth reading beside D. G. Hogarth: "Hogarth stoutly supports the identification; but no other authority is prepared to commit himself." Mitford's later survey of Roman Cyprus in Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt II.7.2 (1980) is the work usually cited for him and was not opened here; neither judgement quoted in this article comes from itSupports: The dating objection to the Soloi stone, and Mitford's doubt about the Tiber candidate, each attached to the inscription he actually wrote it about
• ScholarshipB. Windle, "The Roman Tiber River Inscription and the Cypriote Proconsul Sergius Paulus" — Bryan Windle · Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 67 (2022). Argues from the cursus honorum that the Tiber commissioner and the Cyprus proconsul plausibly are the same man, in explicitly provisional termsSupports: The case for the Tiber inscription and the careful language in which it is made
• ReferenceT. Kennedy, "Sergius Paulus the Proconsul and the Apostle Paul" — Titus Kennedy, APXAIOC Institute of Biblical Archaeology, 12 November 2014 · His own page, read in full — not the second-hand quotation of it that circulates. Both sentences quoted from him in this article are his, and they are about different questions: the "possible, though unconfirmed" hedge belongs to the Pisidian Antioch family-ties explanation for Acts 13:13, while on the identification itself he concludes for itSupports: Kennedy's actual position, with his hedge attached to the claim he hedged
• ReferenceBible Archaeology Report: Sergius Paulus, an archaeological biography — Bryan Windle · A survey of all four inscriptions with the assessments of D. G. Hogarth, W. Ramsay, B. Witherington and T. Kennedy, and an explicit statement that the argument is a connect-the-dots one built on indirect evidenceSupports: The inventory of candidate inscriptions and the range of scholarly verdicts
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Sergius Paulus

Further reading

• Wikipedia: Sergius Paulus
• Associates for Biblical Research: the Roman Tiber inscription and the Cypriot proconsul

Reflect

A Roman governor sent for two travelling preachers because he wanted to hear what they had to say. When did you last go looking for something you had not been told to want?